Thomas Wictor

The Kremlin says that the Islamic State shot down a helicopter gunship, killing two Russian crewmen. For its part, the Islamic State put out a video showing the helicopter crashing. Both Russia and the Islamic State are lying. The video is fake. Someone created it using computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Fake Russian announcement

Here’s what the Russians said.

What does that even mean? They were making a test flight with a Syrian helicopter that just happened to be carrying ammunition? The Mil Mi-25 Hind D is forty-four years old. It’s been tested already. One of the crewmen was even older.

His name was Colonel Habibullin, of the 55th Independent Helicopter Regiment. Russia says they were instructors, but the 55th is an assault unit. A second helicopter is reported to have crashed in Tamdur; so far there’s no more information about that incident.

It’s clear that the Russians near Palmyra were taking part in a combat mission. The chances that the Islamic State shot down the Mi-25 are zero.

Fake video

Here’s the phony Islamic State video.

I immediately knew it was fake, but I had to prove it. The Islamic State made it easy for me.

Still, it makes me sick that the thundering social-media herd uncritically accepts and repeats this.

First I’ll show you the aesthetic reason why this is fake, and then I’ll explain the technical details.

Fake explosion

The helicopter would’ve been hit with only one of two weapons: a surface-to-air missile (SAM) or antiaircraft artillery (AAA). In the case of SAMs, the Islamic State has only man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), meaning shoulder-fired missiles.

Let’s watch the explosion of whatever hit the tail of the Mi-25 gunship. I went to the Islamic State Amaq News Website and downloaded the high-resolution version of the video. The speed is 25 frames per second.

As you can see, the fireball lasted for ten frames.

Now, we’ll look at a video of an American FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS. This video speed is thirty frames per second.

The fireball lasts for two frames at a much higher video speed. There’s no MANPADS that creates such a long-lasting fireball as we saw in the Russian helicopter video.

Furthermore, the helicopter ejects a gout of flame from the tail.

This is not possible. The Mi-25 Hind D has no fuel or oil reservoir in the vertical tail assembly.

And this little cauliflower of flame is totally fake.

It’s reminiscent of the CGI flames in the phony video that the Islamic State claimed to show the murder of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot Lieutenant Moath Youssef al-Kasasbeh. I got a lot of hate mail after I wrote about the hoax that the Islamic State perpetrated on the world. That doesn’t change the fact that the video showing Lieutenant al-Kasasbeh being burned to death is fake. The Islamic State murdered him, but they didn’t burn him to death.

Fake antiaircraft cannon

Somebody wrote that the Islamic State used an antiaircraft cannon to shoot down the Mi-25. The only such medium-caliber weapon available to them is the 57mm S-60.

Here’s a video that shows an S-60 in action, but I can’t post it because I hate the incessant screaming of the Takbir.

My father had a nervous habit of shouting “Oh yes! Yes Indeed!” hundreds if not thousands of times a day. Sometimes he did it every three seconds for hours nonstop. He shouted it in restaurants and hospitals. I have no ability to tolerate endless repetition of the same words over and over and over. Therefore I’ll just post screen grabs.

The S-60 cannon.

And the explosion of the round, at 30 frames per second.

The fireball lasted for two frames. Remember, in the Islamic State video, the fireball lasted ten frames at a much slower video speed. A slower video speed would’ve captured fewer frames of the fireball, not more.

Editing a fake

In both the YouTube and the Amaq News versions of the Islamic State video, frames are repeated.

This is a gif of two successive frames from the YouTube video.

And these are two successive frames from the high-resolution Amaq News video. I marked one frame with a red X.

In fact, in the Amaq News video, every single frame is repeated, resulting in a video speed of 50 frames per second.

What makes frames be repeated in a video? Here’s the answer.

Video-editing software repeats frames. AviDemux is video-editing software.

The Islamic State video is 100 percent fake. It’s CGI that somebody edited using cheap software. The “high-resolution” video has almost no data in it.

One frame from the Amaq News video, with no compression.

It has only 252.8 kilobytes of data. Compare that to one uncompressed frame from the YouTube video of the S-60 cannon.

That one has 709.9 kilobytes of data.

Therefore we see that the Islamic State video is fake. In the scene below from the film Forrest Gump, the explosion and deaths are CGI from a quarter-century ago.

The Islamic State has much more advanced CGI capabilities than major studios had in 1992, the year that filming of Forrest Gump began.

So what happened in Syria?

It’s easy to see why the Islamic State lied about shooting down a Russian helicopter: They wanted credit.

Russia lied because Putin is still trying to carry out provokatsiya, also known as the Algerian strategy. The Russians are still trying to kill all the Syrian rebels who are not homicidal maniacs. Iran and Russia want the only two choices to be Bashar al-Assad or the Islamic State.

So Arab strategic special operators shot down one or maybe even two Russian helicopter gunships. The entire world has not yet grasped the skills and power of Arab League armed forces.

This is stupid. The Arabs trained harder than anybody in history. Of course the end result is the best soldiers in history.

The sooner we all accept that, the sooner there will be peace.