(Reuters) - A February 2023 video of a minaret being taken down in Turkey following an earthquake has been falsely shared as footage showing the demolition of a mosque in China.
Posts on social media platform X, and Facebook, shared the video showing an excavator tearing down a minaret with the caption: “The Chinese government destroying another mosque.
The Chinese Communist Party has been focusing on mosques as part of its crackdown against the Muslim Uyghurs. And yet, not a word of criticism from Arab leaders.”
However, another video of the same demolition shared on TikTok, on March 23, 2023 shows a person wearing a vest, with the name of Turkey’s Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, on it.
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit southeastern Turkey on Feb. 6, 2023, killing more than 50,000 people in Turkey and around 5,900 in Syria, and leaving millions homeless.
Local, outlets, reported on the demolition of the damaged Gökoğlu Mosque’s minaret in Sehyan in the Turkish province of Adana after the earthquake.
The intact minaret can also be seen from an adjacent street in an image dated 2014 on Yandex Maps.
The Turkish Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The posts with the miscaptioned video are circulating in the context of reports that China has demolished mosques in recent years as part of a crackdown on its mostly Muslim Uyghur population.
A Human Rights Watch, report, citing official figures, said China had 39,195 mosques as of 2014, but that several of them had been shut or altered since.
The Financial Times, reported in November 2023 that several mosques had Islamic architecture removed between 2018 and 2023.
New regulations have ordered newly built mosques in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to adopt “Chinese characteristics”, Nikkei Asia reported on Feb. 7, 2024.
VERDICT
Miscaptioned. The video shows the controlled demolition of a damaged minaret in Turkey following the February 2023 earthquake there, not a mosque being demolished in China.