by Scott Creighton
This video supposedly shows the leader of the Martyr Khattab Brigade getting his men ready for an attack in Tell Abiad Syria, just across the border from Akcakale Turkey. At the end of video, they show a FSA group setting up what appears to be a long range mortar launcher.
Many alternative websites including Live Leak and What Really Happened, are running this footage under the guise that it shows these terrorists setting up the actual mortar attack that landed in Turkey and is currently being used as a pretext for a Turkish military response.
Unfortunately that’s just not true. The video claims they are “near the Turkish border” and in fact they are… near Syria’s Western border with Turkey, not Syria’s northern border with Turkey, which is where the mortar attack took place. In fact, the location of the FSA crew setting up the mortar launcher is roughly 120+ miles from the town where the mortar landed, far outside the range of that weapon.
What Live Leak and What Really Happened are showing is a part of the video below, the second part, showing the “rebels” setting up the launcher, but it is clearly stated in the video that the footage is taken from somewhere in Atarib, Syria which is a neighborhood about 13 miles to the West of Aleppo. Aleppo itself is about 110 miles from the Turkish border town where the mortar round reportedly killed 5 civilians.
That means where they are setting up the launcher is about 120 miles from where the mortar hit. That’s not within the range of the launcher.
Unfortunately for What Really Happened, they just took Live Leak at their word without trying to source the origin of the video, which I found. The makers of the original clearly state that they are simply including it to show that the FSA and the terrorists have mortar launchers. Perhaps most importantly, they show the terrorists inside Tell Abiad prior to the mortar being launched, which certainly helps to confirm the fact that they could easily have been the source of the attack.
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Filed under: Scott Creighton
A most relevant task it is – to now casually correct alternative news and analysis that perhaps has gained confidence through mainstream blunder so profuse over the last few month. Sad fact is, that the article under scrutiny here might just as well have played out as imagined.
I’m sure it did play out that way as I originally wrote the day before posting this. But we can’t accept half-baked “evidence” when it comes along because we wish it to be. In the end, all that does is discredit our previous findings.
Very true sir – glad to see that you are an honest man, there are quite enough lies in the world as it is. For example I heard the BBC (only recently regarded as a reasonable honest reporter) describe the initial single mortar round landing in Turkey as an “artillery barrage”. Wtf!
Yes, I totally agree.
I think sometimes a lot of us (including me) forget that integrity is something we must always maintain. Even if our enemies don’t possess any, that’s not an excuse for us to abandon ours.