The Russian defense ministry claimed on Tuesday it had “irrefutable evidence” of the United States helping the Islamic State in Syria using footage revealed to be from a mobile phone game.
In a post on their Facebook account, the ministry used photos found to have been taken from a military simulation video game to claim that U.S. forces and Islamic State militants had cooperated in Syria. The United States is actively aiding anti-ISIS elements in the country, while Russia has supported dictator Bashar al-Assad at the behest of Iran.
“Last week, the Syrian Arab Army supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces has liberated Abu Kamal,” the post read. “The operation ascertained facts of direct cooperation and support provided by the US-led coalition to the ISIS terrorists.”
Russian officials also claimed that American aircraft interfered with the Russian Aerospace Forces’ actions in the area by penetrating a 15-km radius around Abu Kamal with the aim of disrupting the operation.
The post included photos of supposedly armored vehicles traveling through a desert, although experts later revealed they were taken from the smartphone game AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron.
“This is the irrefutable evidence that there is no struggle against terrorism as the whole global community believes,” the post continued. “The U.S. are actually covering the ISIS combat units to recover their combat capabilities, redeploy, and use them to promote the American interests in the Middle East.”
The ministry later retracted the photos and blamed their use on a Syrian employee but added that the “U.S. command’s refusal to carry out strikes on the convoys of ISIL terrorists retreating from Albu Kamal” remained an “objective fact.”
“[We are] carrying out checks on a civilian employee who mistakenly added photographs to the ministry’s statement,” a ministry spokesperson told reporters.
The extraordinary claims raise further questions about Russia’s trust and relationship with the U.S. and appear to contradict one of the stated aims of the Trump administration’s agenda of destroying the Islamic State.
Since 2015, Russia has actively supported and armed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army amid the country’s ongoing civil war, while the U.S.-led coalition has focused solely on the destruction of ISIS.
Last month, the U.S.-led coalition celebrated victory over the Islamic State in the Syrian city of Raqqa, shortly after their loss in Mosul, Iraq. The defeats have broken the “terror state” back into a terrorist organization and that the group’s revenues have slumped by 95 percent.
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