ABC News ‘slaughter in Syria’ footage comes from Knob - Creek, Kentucky, not Syria. Posted: Oct 14th, 2019 - 11:45 am
Are you distrustful of the coverage of what is happening now in northern Syria between the Kurds and the Turkish army? You have good reason to be.
ABC aired supposedly shocking footage Monday morning purporting to be from the frontline battle between the Syrian Kurds and the invading Turks. The only problem is the footage appears to come from a nighttime demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.
After seeing a comment from Wojciech Pawelczyk, I began making some calls. As of this writing, it appears that this video is a hoax, and ABC has pulled it down.
"We are still investigating," a representative for the gun range told the Washington Examiner Monday, adding the images aired by ABC "looks to be" from the Kentucky property.
"As of right now," the spokesperson added, "it seems to be our footage."
A spokesperson for ABC conceded it made a big mistake.
"We’ve taken down video that aired on 'World News Tonight Sunday' and 'Good Morning America' this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy," a spokesman told the Washington Examiner."ABC News regrets the error.”
“This video, obtained by ABC News, appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad,” senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell, who is in Syria, said Monday on Good Morning America.
As he spoke, ABC aired footage showing undisclosed gunmen firing tracer bullets at undisclosed targets, causing massive, fiery explosions. Furious stuff indeed.
Earlier, on Sunday, ABC News anchor Tom Llamas also aired the allegedly shocking footage, claiming it showed a fierce Turkish attack on Kurd civilians.
“The situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria. One week since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [the Islamic State],” he said.
Llamas then described the video as it aired on-screen.
“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies,” he added.
The intro to the show he anchored, ABC World News Tonight, also claimed of the footage: “A border town, bombarded by Turkey’s military!”
The footage would indeed be stunning were if actually from northern Syria. It would be horrific were it actually to show a Turkish assault on Kurd civilians. But it does not show that. The footage, which appears to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for their audience in Kentucky. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which involves the very popular night shoot, is an annual event at the Kentucky gun range. People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they record it and post footage of it to social media. Videos such as this:
It is hard to see how this footage went to air as it did with no one at ABC questioning or catching that it might not actually be from northern Syria.
Note that the sequence and shape of explosions is identical in the ABC and Kentucky videos, as are some of the features of the terrain amid the explosions. But we might actually be dealing with two different videos of the same Kentucky live-fire event from slightly different angles. In the independent film of the live-fire event in Kentucky, you can clearly see taller objects in the foreground that seem to appear as silhouettes in the ABC footage.
LINK/URL: ABC News ‘slaughter in Syria’ footage comes from Knob
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