A video shared by Dr Ahmad Gumi yesterday has caused some excitement. It showed a military helicopter with a European crew landing in an African bush and dropping some passengers.
Dr Gumi said that the video has revealed the truth about who is behind our insecurity. Although he has not said it openly, most of his followers understood it to be a reference to the alleged Western sponsorship of bandits and insurgents in Nigeria.
The security analyst Akelicious did some fact-checking yesterday and he traced the event depicted in the video not to Nigeria or the Sahel region of West Africa but to Darfur in Sudan.
Makama shared a still image from a Sudanese Facebook user’s page which showed a scene that is very similar to the one in Gumi’s video and the Arabic inscription on the image said that the location was Darfur (see the two top images shared here).
The two helicopters, the appearance of the sky, the grass cover and the crowd in the still image and the screen grab from Dr Gumi’s video all look similar.
In addition to the fack-checking by Makama, my own investigation indicated that the helicopter in Dr Gumi’s clip is a Russian Mil Mi-8 (see the comparison between a stock image of the helicopter brand and the one in Dr Gumi’s video; the identical elements are circled in blue).
The Western powers may own Russian helicopters in their inventories but they only use them for training i.e. to give their personnel familiarity with Russian equipment.
They don’t use them for their operations. Since the Russian Wagner group and its successor the Africa Corps are known to operate in a number of African countries, the helicopter and crew in Gumi’s video are almost certainly Russian not Western.
Far from being a proof of Western sponsorship of insecurity, Gumi’s clip, from all indications, only shows how Russia has been assisting some of its African allies in their wars or counter-insurgency efforts. But no one can stop people from getting their dopamine fix.
