Days after Morocco and Israel announced the strengthening of their military cooperation, a picture appeared on social media that was said to show the Algerian army starting to install missiles in the southwest of the country, suggesting that it was a response to this step.
And the circulating picture shows what appears to be heavy military vehicles, and the accompanying comments on Facebook and Twitter said, “The installation of the destroyed missiles has begun in Tindouf.”
But the photo was actually taken years ago, and it has nothing to do with Algeria.
According to what “Agence France Presse” found, this photo appeared with this claim on the 23rd of this July.
Days before the appearance of these publications, specifically on the twentieth of July, Morocco and Israel announced the strengthening of their military cooperation in talks that took place in Rabat between the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, General Aviv Kohavi, and a number of senior officials.
The pace of rapprochement between Morocco and Israel has accelerated since the diplomatic normalization that took place between them in December 2020 within the framework of the Abraham agreements concluded between Israel and several Arab countries, under the auspices of Washington.
This strategic and military partnership enjoys the blessing of the United States, but it worries Algeria, which does not have any relations with Israel and is a supporter of the Palestinian cause, and also supports the Polisario Front, which is demanding a referendum to decide the fate of Western Sahara on its independence from Morocco.
Morocco normalized its relationship with the Hebrew state, while the United States recognized the “Moroccanism” of Western Sahara, the disputed territory considered the kingdom’s “first national issue.”
Morocco controls about 80 percent of Western Sahara, and it proposes negotiating with the Polisario to grant the territory autonomy under the sovereignty of Rabat, and stipulates that Algeria attend these negotiations as a “party to the conflict.”
But the circulated image has nothing to do with all of that, as he led the search for it on the search engines first to an Arab site concerned with weapons and arsenals.
According to this website, the photo shows air defense weapons of the army of Uzbekistan deployed by the Ministry of Defense of that Central Asian country.
Indeed, on the site you can find a link from a YouTube channel of the Ministry of Defense of Uzbekistan that is followed by tens of thousands of people.
This video was published in 2019, which also refutes the fact that it is recent, as the misleading publications claimed, and it shows the training of the Uzbek army.