Syrian helicopter crash exposes hidden view of Assad’s barrel-bomb campaign
Alan O’Riordan/@StoryfulAlan
Storyful has a rigorous verification process for establishing and confirming the authenticity of video content from the social web. Last week, journalists Alan O’Riordan and Lobna Hassan examined footage circulated by activists after it was obtained from a Syrian-forces helicopter crew whose aircraft crashed in Idlib province.
Rebels in Idlib claimed the capture of a Syrian-forces helicopter crew in March after the crew’s aircraft crashed near Jabal al-Zawiya. Several weeks later, video was circulated described as having been taken by one of the helicopter’s crew and showing them carrying out a barrel-bomb raid in the same region.
Barrel bombs are a crude and destructive weapon the use of which has long been denied by Syrian officials, including President Bashar al-Assad. Human Rights Watch details their use here. Storyful documented their impact in a recent mini-documentary, here (warning: graphic content).
Given the extensive regime air campaigns across the Idlib region, provoked by recent rebel advances, we at Storyful were interested to see if the video, below, supported the claims about it made by activists.
The first clue to a possible location comes at 50 seconds in the footage above. It’s a shot of a tablet held by one of the crew, showing a lake:
A quick scan of the area found a similar lake in Latakia province, west of Idlib:
The presence of the lake could not confirm the location, as it came from a tablet and not a view of the terrain from the helicopter, but it gave us a starting point. The helicopter footage goes on to give an aerial view of the terrain over which the helicopter is flying. The mountainous landscape shows some distinct patterns from winding roads nearby the site of the barrel-bomb strike:
Using the lake as a marker, we searched for matching patterns on Google Maps. We found an exact match some 24km from the lake, giving us the strike site — nearby a mountain road lying just inside the boundary of Hama governorate, between Latakia and Idlib.
The video we examined ends by cutting to footage of a crash site, showing the wreckage of what appears to be a Russian-made Mil Mi-14. We checked the footage against contemporary reports of the crash, from March, and found the helicopter to have the same number on its tail fin. The interior shots of the helicopter also tally with the cockpit and layout of an Mil Mi-14. The crash site is given as Jabal al-Zawiya, less than 30km from the strike site we geolocated from the video.
While it was not possible to prove absolutely that the helicopter filmed in flight by a crew member was the same as the wreckage filmed by locals in Idlib, the geolocation we were able to do, coupled with explanations of the video’s emergence and the aircraft’s model, strongly supported the claim.
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