Misbar geolocates viral footage of Eritrean forces inside Ethiopia's Tigray region

TLDR

• A video and two photographs circulating online claimed to show Eritrean forces moving inside Ethiopia's Tigray region.¹
• Misbar's verification team matched landmarks in the footage against satellite imagery to pin the video to the A2 road in Idaga Hamus, and the photos to the same road nearby.¹
• A close look at a truck's registration plate in the video found a style consistent with Eritrean commercial vehicles, though the plate number itself could not be read.¹
• The geolocation lands in the middle of a disputed, fast-moving story: Ethiopia says Eritrean troops crossed the border, Eritrea's government denies it.¹

Landmark matching places the video on a specific road

Footage attributed to Eritrean forces inside Tigray spread on social media this week, with a video said to show the town of Idaga Hamus and two photographs attributed to nearby Adigrat.¹ Misbar's team at Alaraby TV matched geographical landmarks visible in the video against satellite imagery and identified the filming location as the main A2 road in Idaga Hamus, at coordinates 14 degrees 11 minutes 32.0 seconds north, 39 degrees 33 minutes 41.0 seconds east.¹

Why it matters: when a government directly disputes a battlefield claim, geolocating the raw footage against satellite imagery is often the only independent check available before officials, witnesses and advocacy groups weigh in with competing accounts.¹

Driving the news:

• Separately, Misbar examined two photographs also attributed to Eritrean forces and found their landmarks matched the same A2 road, just under half a kilometer from the video's location, at coordinates 14 degrees 11 minutes 17.6 seconds north, 39 degrees 33 minutes 47.0 seconds east.¹
• Misbar's team enlarged a visible registration plate on a red truck in the video. The plate's layout, a mostly white background with a red side strip, resembles the style used on Eritrean commercial vehicles, although the individual characters remained too indistinct to read.¹
• The geolocation lands inside an active dispute: Reuters reported witnesses in Adigrat saying they saw two trucks carrying dozens of soldiers they identified as Eritrean on the morning of October 7, days after Ethiopia and Eritrea severed diplomatic relations.¹
• An East Africa expert at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project told Misbar that Eritrean forces had crossed the border at Zalambessa and moved toward Adigrat, and that Ethiopian drones had targeted vehicles carrying them in the nearby Guada area.¹
• Eritrea's Information Minister, Yemane Ghebremeskel, denied Eritrean forces were present and described the witness accounts as part of an Ethiopian effort to justify what he called military aggression against Eritrea.¹

The big picture: Misbar's geolocation establishes where the specific video and photos were filmed, not who is right about troop movements more broadly. The U.S. State Department has called on both governments to exercise restraint, warning that open conflict between them would put its cooperation with each country at risk, underscoring how contested the underlying facts remain even as individual pieces of footage get pinned to real coordinates.¹

Single-source note: this article relies on Misbar's own geolocation work as the sole source. A second research round specifically looking for an independent outlet that geolocated the same video or photographs turned up none. Several outlets (Reuters, BBC, ACLED-sourced reporting) corroborate the broader claim that Eritrean forces are operating inside Tigray, but none independently verified the location of this specific footage, so that part of the claim rests on Misbar's methodology alone.