The image provided by the Russian defence ministry was damning: three Daesh trucks led by an armoured vehicle on their way to a key battlefield in eastern Syria, allowed safe passage by the United States.

Russian drones, its foreign ministry said on social media, spotted the convoy fleeing Bukamal on Nov. 9, the same day Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces said they captured the key militant stronghold on the Euphrates River. Their safe passage was “irrefutable evidence” the United States allows the Daesh, also known as ISIS, to wreak havoc to meet their interests in the region, the ministry said on Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re a gamer interested in air combat simulators, you may have already seen the convoy before you gunned down digital enemies on your computer screen while playing AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special OPS Squadron, released in 2015 by the Byte Conveyor game studio.

The game, developed for smartphones and shown in videos posted by what appears to be a now-defunct company, allows users to destroy enemy vehicles from the controls of the AC-130, the U.S. military’s go-to aircraft for close air support and ground strikes, using weapons that transform the plane into a piece of artillery with wings.

How the image ended up in the mix of infrared images posted by the Russian defence ministry is unclear. But the posts for both Twitter and Facebook were deleted (a web cache of the Facebook page is available). Similar messages are still found on the ministry’s Twitter feed. The Conflict Intelligence Team, a group of amateur digital sleuths that tracks Russian operations in Syria, concluded other photos in the post were from a June 2016 video of Iraqi airstrikes on Daesh positions in Fallujah.

The images “represent just one more episode of a recurrent pattern of defamation, distortion, distraction that seeks to discredit the U.S. and our successful coalition fight against ISIS in Syria,” Marine Corps Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement Tuesday.

Rankine-Galloway said the episode comes at a strange time following a Saturday joint statement from U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that highlighted efforts by the countries to remove Syrian airspace from the conflict to avoid collisions and other mishaps.

“To date, the Syrian regime and Russian Federation have not demonstrated long-term success in ridding large pieces of terrain from ISIS influence, then establishing the conditions necessary to prevent terrorists’ return,” Rankine-Galloway added.

Putin’s chief spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Wednesday that “mistakes happen” and the person involved was punished, The Associated Press reported, though it remains unclear if the inclusion of phoney images was intentional or a mistake.

U.S. army Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesperson for the U.S.-led coalition to defeat Daesh, told reporters Tuesday the Russian image was “about as accurate as their air campaign,” riffing on accusations that Russia has carried out airstrikes without concern for civilian deaths. Monitoring groups have accused the United States for increasing civilian deaths in Raqqa in the operation to rid Daesh militants from its de facto capital.

There is a grain of truth to U.S. efforts to allow passage to fleeing Daesh fighters, though it is more complicated than allowing militants to leave.

A Hezbollah-brokered deal in September allowed militants and their families to head from the Lebanon-Syria border toward the Syria-Iraq border. U.S. warplanes cratered the highway to block their escape and trap them in the open, even releasing Hellfire missiles to strike fighters leaving the convoy to urinate during the two-week standoff.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“If we have a clean shot against an ISIS fighter, we take that shot,” Rankine-Galloway said.

Ironically, the Russians asked U.S. officials to allow their passage, a request it reluctantly accommodated.

Read more about: