Video of building demolition from Turkey falsely linked to Manipur violence

By: Anurag Baruah
June 21 2023

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Context

With no respite from violence in the Indian State of Manipur, mis/disinformation around the ethnic clashes between the Kuki tribe and the Meitei community continues to spread on social media. The violence that broke out after a ‘Tribal Solidarity March’ on May 3, 2023, has claimed the lives of over 100 people. 

In one such case, a video has gone viral on social media which claims to show Kukis destroying Meitei houses in Manipur. In the video, a damaged, multi-storied building gets razed. A Facebook page called the ‘Manipur Updates’ posted the video on June 19, 2023. The video had been viewed more than 19,000 times at the time of writing this story.

However, we found that the clip is from Turkey and not Manipur. 

In Fact

On conducting a reverse image search, we came across the same video uploaded by a TikTok user Ismail Fidan on April 13, 2023. The caption stated that the video shows the demolition of a building in Defne, Hatay. The same user had uploaded similar videos of other buildings being demolished on his profile. In fact, this person can be seen standing near the demolition site in one of the photos.  

Taking a cue from here, we contacted Fidan, who said that he shot the video. He told us that the video was from Defne in Hatay. Next, we geolocated the building on Google Maps, which further confirmed that the building was indeed in Antakya, a city in the Defne district of Hatay province in Turkey. 

We also came across multiple news reports stating that the buildings that were damaged due to the earthquake that hit Turkey-Syria on February 6, 2023, were later demolished. According to an article published in The New York Times on March 13, 2023, the damage due to the earthquake was so extensive that officials estimated that nearly 80 percent of the buildings in Antakya needed to be demolished.

The Verdict

The claim that Kukis destroyed the multi-storied building in Manipur is false. We geolocated the building seen in the video and found that it is in Turkey. Therefore, we are marking the claim as false.