A TikTok video depicting parts of Marawi City as modern, snow-covered, and a war zone is fake and misleading.
There is currently no war in Marawi, which was seized by the Islamic State-aligned Maute Group in May 2017. The urban warfare, which displaced at least 350,000 civilians, lasted for five months.
In the video posted by @chrysippusss on March 25 with the text “It’s just a city in Mindanao, Philippines,” a series of clips were used to depict the Saduc-Pub Road of Marawi City as an extremely modernized highway with skyscrapers, the MSU Golf course as a snow-covered mountain with a stretched river, and the city’s fireworks display as waves of airstrike.
The timelapse of a modern highway with skyscrapers, which was used to portray Saduc-Pub Road in the video, was found to be a stock footage.
Marawi City does have a highway that was completed on September 30, 2021, but it is a far cry from what the video had depicted. It is called the Marawi Transcentral Road (MTR), which spans 18.97 kilometers.
The road construction was funded by the Government of Japan through the Japan International Cooperation Agency to improve the road network of the city, amounting to two billion Japanese Yen or P970.97 million. It was built under the Program for the Support to Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Marawi City and Its Surrounding Areas.
Similarly, the depiction of the MSU Golf course in the TikTok post is also fake.
The Philippines is a tropical country that does not experience a snow season. The country’s climate can be divided into two seasons, rainy or dry.
The last clip portraying the “fireworks display” in the city as a series of airstrikes is misleading.
The clip was taken by ABS-CBN News in Marawi six years ago while the city was under siege.
Marawi had undergone a siege that started in May 2017 and ended in October that same year, after terrorist leaders were declared killed by the government troops.
As of Sunday morning, the TikTok post garnered over 6,563 likes, 415 comments, 403 saves, 191 shares, and 78.1 thousand views.
While many netizens were amused by the video, TikTok user @Jyee commented: “Whoever is watching this and don’t know the view of that place, everyone this is exactly what Marawi City looks like.”
The country’s only islamic city has been subjected to rehabilitation in the past several years since.
During his second State of the Nation Address in July, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said that Marawi is “now getting back to normalcy,” brought about by the projects and programs established by the national government and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
As with all our other reports, MindaNews welcomes leads or suggestions from the public to potential fact-check stories.
MindaNews is a verified signatory to the Code of Principles of the International Fact-Checking Network. (Miah Christine Bontilao / MindaNews)
