FACT CHECK: Old Video from Syria Passed Off as Recent Scenes in Afghanistan…

As India celebrated its 75^th Independence Day on Sunday, Taliban forces entered the Afghan capital Kabul forcing the incumbent President Ashraf Ghani to flee the country and thus seizing power in the country.

In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul, social media witnessed a flurry of disturbing videos showing desperate Afghans trying to flee the country to save themselves from the Taliban. However, there was one video that was shared with a caption apparently celebrating the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan. The video soon went viral on Facebook.

On investigation, Fact Crescendo found that the video was an old video from Syria and has nothing to do with the present situation in Afghanistan. Let’s check out the narrative that was being spread on the social media with the help of the unrelated video and how we found out the truth.

Viral Claim on Social Media:

Facebook

Archived Link

Screen recording of the Facebook post given above shows scenes from a battlefield. The fighters can be heard chanting “Allah-hu-Akbar” or ‘God is Great!’ and tearing down a flag and ultimately burning it down. We can also see a convoy of vehicles fleeing the scene. The caption accompanying the video reads as follows:

“BIG BREAKING.

with the Taliban in control of the presidential palace in kubal .And the US Ambassador fleeing to the airport , Taliban have won the war. inshallah Next Kashmir ✌️✌️✌️✌️ ”

The user seems to be celebrating the fact that Taliban has taken over the Afghan capital city of Kabul (misspelled in the caption as ‘Kubal’) and also suggesting that same will be repeated in Kashmir. However, this is not the only post having a similar caption. Some similar posts can be found by clicking the following links: post1, post2.

However, is this video really from Kabul? Let’s find out…

Fact Check:

In order to find out the truth about the video, we fragmented the video into various key frames using In-Vid We Verify tool. A reverse image search on Google on one of the key frames thus isolated gave us the following video posted in the year 2019 on YouTube.

The video posted by a verified YouTube channel called Orient TV has a caption in Arabic that reads as follows when translated to English: “Unforgettable moments from the history of the Syrian revolution, the liberation of Idlib”

Idlib is a city in Syria, which is suffering from a civil war from more than a decade. When we searched using a combination of keywords related to Idlib and Syrian revolution on Google, we can across a news article published by Al-Jazeera on the incident in 2015. Thus, confirming the incident is more than 6 years old. 

Read the full article, click here- Al-Jazeera

As per the article, the Syrian rebel forces captured the city of Idlib from the armed forces backing Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in March 2015. We can see the flag of Syria in one of the screengrabs taken from the viral video.

Also, the language heard in the video is Arabic and not Pashto or Dari or any other Persian languages spoken in Afghanistan. 

Conclusion

The video is not from Afghanistan and it is unrelated to the recent situation in the country. The video is a 6-year-old video from Syria showing rebel forces celebrating after capturing the city of Idlib from the Syrian forces backing Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.