Egyptian Rafale Fighters Aren't Assigned to Destroy Ethiopian GERD
The Claim
The Egyptian army assigned its Rafale fighters to destroy the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam GERD.
News posted on
Emerging story
Videos circulating on YouTube and Facebook claim that Egyptian Rafale fighter jets are assigned to destroy the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam GERD using SCALP-EG (Storm Shadow) long-range cruise missiles.
The claims also include information alleging the Egyptian Army announced forming its 203 tactical fighter wing “Storm” from Rafale fighters to take GERD down.
Different videos with the same claims started circulating in March, with a high rate of reach, engagements, and millions of views.
These videos come as the conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia is rising because of the Ethiopian intentions to fill its GERD without agreement with the partner Nile basin countries, Egypt and Sudan, risking causing a water scarcity crisis for downstream countries.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar's investigation found this claim to be misleading. By conducting research following the news published to cover the GERD conflict, observing these videos, and reviewing the Egyptian Army official social media, the team discovered that these videos discuss features, functions, and potentials of the fighter jet Dassault Rafale owned currently by the Egyptian Army.
The titles and captions are misleading because they claim that the Egyptian army announced that they assigned Rafale fighters to destroy the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam GERD. These videos' content portrays this disinformation.
The videos assume that assigning destroying GERD to the Rafale wing is just an expectation of an anonymous foreign expert. However, no official announcement has been made by the Egyptian army – neither regarding the stated mission nor about identifying which Egyptian fighter wing their new Rafale joined.
Further investigation unveiled the source of this misleading information is an article published by The International Bar Association in December 2019. The writer of this article tries to draw a connection between purchases of SCALP-EG (Storm Shadow) long-range cruise missiles for the Egyptian Rafale and the potential of bombing GERD.
We also found the sources about adding Rafale to 203 tactical fighter wing “Storm” were 2 Facebook pages. These published this news in 2015 and 2017 without mentioning any official source. While one of the pages holds the name EGY ARMY, it doesn’t belong to the Egyptian Army or represent it in any official capacity.
Last, even after the collapse of GERD negotiations, official Egyptian statements didn’t officially announce any missions for the Egyptian Army in Ethiopia.
However, The Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi commented on the failure of the latest negotiations round and the Ethiopian intentions to proceed with the 2nd filling of the dam on its own by saying, “all options are possible. Egypt’s water is affected.”
Ten years ago, Ethiopia started building the GERD, and then the conflict began, as Egypt wants to avoid massive cuts of water supplies and save its rights in Nile water. In addition, Sudan is concerned about the expected water needs of its citizens as well as the dam’s operational safety.
