Looks like Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq’s video claiming to have killed ISIS jihadis in Iraq with Iranian drone strikes was even worse than I thought. Nothing particularly earth-shattering—fake video is extra fake!—but it’s still amusing.
A few months ago I wrote a longish piece for Medium on Iran’s drone program(s). In the course of the research for it, I found out that a video put out by Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, an Iranian proxy group in Iraq (Phil Smyth has the best analysis of the group and its role in Iraq), purporting to show the group directing a Shahed-129 drone strike on ISIS targets was a fake. Shocking, I know.
The group made the mistake of using footage from the Iraqi Air Force showing manned aircraft hitting ISIS targets with American-provided Hellfire missiles. Bonus points for using the right kind of missile. Minus several thousand for the terrible copy and paste job.
Above: Still from the Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq video. Below: Still from the Iraqi MOD video. Annotations in both by yours truly.
In the course of some recent organizing of old notes, I took a look at the video again and noticed that the control station footage Asa'ib was hinting as the Shaheds didn’t look like the footage of Shahed-129 control stations shown by Iranian TV.
Shahed-129 control stations as depicted on Iranian TV
There’s a good reason for that: they’re not Shahed-129 ground control stations. The control stations that Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq would like you to believe are helping them direct missile strikes are in fact shots of a Reaper training control station used by U.S. Air Force UAV pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Asa'ib ripped them off from a Journeyman Pictures documentary about drones called “Rise of the Machines."
Above: Still from Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq video. Below: Still from Journey Pictures documentary "Rise of the Machines”
Asa'ib tried to make the ripoff fit a little better into its video by altering the control station screens in its ripped off version. Their video shows black and white footage of ISIS holdouts beaming back and forth from field troops back and the control station so the prosaic color footage from the original Journeyman doc screens wouldn’t quite fit. Hence the edits.
As is always the case, though, the little things help give you away. The same multicolor retractible pen is visible resting on the top of the keyboard in each shot, to say nothing of the overall similarity of shots.
Nice try, fellas but Bic tells no lies.
The funny thing is how unnecessary this particular copy and paste job was. Ripping off the Iraqi Air Force footage makes sense. Faking convincing strike footage on their own would be relatively more difficult. Insofar as one is ok with pilfering footage to tell lies, better to use the Iraq Air Force video as it involves the appropriate targets (ISIS), environment (Iraq) and munitions (Hellfire air-to-ground missile) for the kind of story they’re trying to tell.
The control station copy & paste job makes relatively less sense to me, though. The Shahed TV rollout that showed the correct control station took place in September 2013 and the video was widely available on YouTube that same month. The Asa'ib video wasn’t released until January 2014—months later.
Maybe they figured the Shahed-129 footage would be too easily recognized so better to pick a more obscure source. Who knows.