Image of military personnel. Photo Source: Facebook.
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Claim: A Facebook user shared photos with claims that Senegalese military personnel were killed in a fresh attack by Casamance rebels.
Verdict: Misleading! Two of the images showed old activities of the Senegalese army that took place in different locations and at different times. The last one is related to a recent killing that took place in Kenya. None of the images is related to any recent killing or a Casamance rebel’s attack on the Senegalese army.
Full Text
Bakary Jagne, a Facebook user with 29,000 followers, posted a claim that the Casamance rebels have, again, attacked and killed Senegalese military officers.
He attached three photos collaged as one. Two of the images showed military officers on an operation inside a forest. The last one showed a supposedly dead soldier lying on the ground.
He wrote, “highest military security forces in Casamance again. Another military officer has been killed by the Casamance rebels.”
Casamance is a Senegalese community near the border of the Gambia. The Casamance conflict is an old conflict between the government of Senegal and the Movement of Democratic Forces of Senegal (MFDC), commonly referred to as the rebels. The conflict has been ongoing since December 1982.
The conflict has lasted for about 40 years. However, following multiple peace agreements brokered between 2022 and 2025, the region is considered more stable than in previous decades.
Although Bakary’s claim has gained little attention on Facebook, it appeared to be resurrecting a sensitive occurrence that has led to loss of lives in the past.
In the comment sections, many users believed the claim. Bakary Jagne wrote, “RIP”
And another user, Fatoubintou Manneh, reacted with a crying emoji.
DUBAWA conducted this verification due to the nature of the claim and its likelihood to contain falsehood.
Verification
We conducted a keyword search to determine whether there has been any recent conflict between Senegalese soldiers and the members of the Movement of Democratic Forces for Casamance (rebels). Results showed there have been none recently.
As reported by DW, the most recent fight between the two parties took place in 2022, when two Senegalese soldiers were killed while on a mission in Casamance, a neighbourhood near Gambia.
We further disassembled the photo collage used in the claim and conducted a Google reverse image search on each image.
For item A, as labelled in the collage, we traced the image to the dismantling of an illegal gold-mining site in Sekhoto, on the banks of the Faleme River. The operation, carried out by the Senegalese military, took place on Nov. 9, 2024. We also found a similar story about the image here and here.
We traced item B to the last Casamance incident, which occurred on March 13, 2022. As published by Méridionale TV on YouTube and Senego, the image was taken when the Senegalese military appeared on the northern border of Casamance, following the deaths and hostage-taking of Senegalese soldiers.
Unlike the previous two, search results on item C led us to the recent killing of a soldier that happened in Meru, Kenya. This particular image had nothing to do with the Senegalese military or Casamance.
Conclusion
The photos shared to depict a new clash between the Senegalese military and Casamance rebels are completely unrelated. While two of the three images were taken from past activities of the Senegalese army, we traced the last image to a recent killing that took place in Kenya. The claim is therefore misleading.
This report was produced under the 2026 Kwame Karikari Fact-checking and OSINT Fellowship, co-hosted by DUBAWA and the Digital Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Information Disorder Analysis Centre (DAIDAC), with support from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).
