Video of an Old Demonstration Shared as 'Live Situation' in Afghanistan

The video is of a street play performed to reenact an incident where civilians were allegedly shot by the Taliban.

Amid reports of civilians being shot by the Taliban in Afghanistan, a video of a group of armed men shooting at a passing vehicle and pulling out corpses from it is going viral on social media.

Loud chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (god is great) can be heard over a speaker system as more civilians are frisked, threatened, and made to kneel in the middle of a road before being executed.

But the video, which is being shared as the ‘live situation’ in Afghanistan is in fact an old video of a street show, which was performed to reenact similar incidents that have occurred in Jalrez district in Afghanistan, where the Taliban executed members of the Hazara community.

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CLAIM

The video is being massively shared on WhatsApp with claims such as "live from Afghanistan", "situation in Afghanistan" among others.

Another Twitter user Sameet Thakkar shared the video. It had been viewed over 67,000 times at the time of writing this story.

The Quint received multiple queries about the video on its WhatsApp Tipline number.

WHAT WE FOUND

We carefully observed the video for clues to help us get more details about the incident in the video.

On the top-left corner, a watermark with the word ‘Afghan’ accompanied by text in another language was visible. Using Google Lens, we scanned the logo and found that it translated to Afghan International.

We looked up ‘Afghan International’ on Google and found a YouTube channel with the same name. We also found the same viral video uploaded to the channel on 25 September 2019.

Upon translating the page, we saw that the video’s caption mentioned “artists being beaten by the Taliban in Jalriz”.

Adding the channel’s name to keywords similar to the caption in Pashto (افغان نړیوال هنرمندان د طالب جلریز لخوا وتړل شول), we came across a news report by Etilaaroz, an Afghan news media website.

This report carried a still from the video, noting that it was a ‘symbolic movement’ by activists in Kabul, which was related to the killing of civilian passengers in Jalrez, Afghanistan.

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Further, one can notice cameras and the artists using mics during the act, making it evident that it is not a real incident.

To understand the context of the video better, we contacted Farhad Mohammadi, a BBC reporter in Kabul, who told us that the video was a recreation of a prior event.

Mohammadi said that there have been incidents in Jalrez district, where the Taliban has reportedly “stopped civilian cars and shot the Hazara passengers”.

Evidently, the video does not show the current situation in Afghanistan, but is an old video of a street play that was performed to highlight civilian killings by the Taliban.

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