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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

War & conflict fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about war & conflict. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

5,840 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYWar & conflict

Visuals showing Indian soldier taking down an opponent’s jet through a missile strike

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a video that appears to show a man leaving a fighter jet and destroying an opponent’s jet with a missile, shared as real footage of an Indian soldier. FACTLY reports that it traced the visuals to a video-game trailer rather than a real military encounter. It says reverse image searches of screenshots from the circulating clip led to a video with similar visuals, and identifies that video as the “Battlefield 2042 Official Reveal Trailer (ft. 2WEI).” The review reports that the trailer was uploaded to the Battlefield YouTube channel on 9 June 2021. At the 3:14 mark, it says, the trailer contains the visual of a fighter jet being taken down that appears in the viral clip. The review also describes the trailer as promoting Battlefield 2042, a first-person shooter. This connection to the original game footage is the evidence the article gives for why the clip does not show the claimed Indian military action. FACTLY further says it found no reports of the Indian Army taking part in such aerial combat “lately.” The excerpt does not identify a specific alleged combat event or describe a separate check of military records; its stated visual comparison and identification of the trailer are the concrete evidence for its conclusion. Taken together, the review concludes that the visuals are from a video game and were falsely attributed to the Indian Army.

Fact Crescendo Sri LankaWar & conflict

ජුලි 22 අළුයම අරගල භුමියට එල්ලවූ ප්‍රහාරයේ දී පහර කෑමට ලක්වූ කාන්තාව ලෙස හුවමාරු වන ඡායාරූප සටහන් පිළිබඳ පැහැදිලි කිරීමක්!

Publisher’s rating: Explainer

The review examined social-media photographs presented as showing women assaulted during the security forces’ July 22, 2022, raid on protesters at Galle Face Green’s “Gota Go Gama” protest site in Colombo. It traced two different images that were being associated with the attack: one identifying a woman in a photograph, and another pairing Sadini Dheeraratne’s image with a photograph of someone’s injured back. The review’s findings distinguish those images rather than treating them as photographs of the same person. The first photograph was not of a woman assaulted in the July 22 raid. The review identifies the person shown as Shobana Dharmaraja, also known as Isaipriya, a Tamil journalist and LTTE television presenter, and says her image was being reused in posts about the attack. For the other claim, the review identifies Sadini Dheeraratne as a woman visible in widely circulated footage of the raid, but says the photograph of an injured back was not her. It reports that Sadini herself said on Facebook that she was not the person in that photograph. The review further reports that the person shown with the injured back was a transgender woman, Chanu Nimesha, who said she had been seriously injured in the raid. In an update dated July 25, she told the reviewers that she had removed her blouse to show the injuries while in pain and distress. Thus, the circulating images included a historical photograph wrongly presented as a current victim and a separate injury photograph wrongly attributed to Sadini; the person in the latter image was identified in the review as Chanu Nimesha.

DoğrulaWar & conflict

Fotoğrafın, Esad rejimi komutanlarının ‘TSK operasyonu’ hazırlığını gösterdiği iddiası

Publisher’s rating: Yanlış

The claim concerned a social-media photo said to show Syrian forces preparing an operation against Turkey. The review says the image was taken from a video of students graduating from an advanced lightning course at Syria’s Military Academy, rather than depicting the preparation alleged in the posts. It also notes that the photo’s visible map became a subject of mockery as the claim spread.

Culturalist PressWar & conflict

The U.S. demonstrated the lethal power of armed drones in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, when officials used them for targeted killings in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Publisher’s rating: The first lethal drones ever deployed were the MQ-9 Hunter Killer drones by the US military in Afghanistan

Related reporting discusses U.S. targeted strikes during the Bush and Obama years, but its excerpt supports a narrower account than the claim’s phrase “demonstrated the lethal power.” It says targeted drone and air strikes numbered in the thousands in Afghanistan and the hundreds in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and reports a drone strike in Iraq that killed a person described as being outside the country. The excerpt does not establish that the strikes were intended as demonstrations of drone capability. The reporting says Obama relied on Joint Special Operations Command capabilities more heavily than Bush and that, in Obama’s first term, targeted strikes peaked in 2010. It also says the United States killed or captured 45 jihadist leaders during Obama’s time in office. Because the excerpt combines drone and air strikes for its Afghanistan figures, it does not give a drone-only total there. Nor does it provide a comparable Bush-era strike count or details identifying the Iraq victim or strike date.