Sat 21 August 2021:
A video of men dancing with weapons has been viewed millions of times on social media, claiming that it shows Taliban fighters celebrating after capturing the Afghan capital in August 2021. The claim is false: the video has been circulating online since March 2021 and is apparently from a wedding event in Pakistan.
“Taliban militants’ DJ dance while Afghan people were rushing to save their lives after the capture of Kabul,” reads a Bengali-language Facebook post from August 17.
The video shows a group of men dancing while wielding guns.
The video was shared around the world, including in the Netherlands, Nigeria, the Philippines and the United States.
Some of the videos purported to show the men dancing to “In My Feelings” by Canadian rapper Drake. One such video was viewed more than 3.5 million times on Facebook in Kenya.
The video, however, has been shared in a false context.
A reverse image search of a keyframe extracted from the footage using the InVID-WeVerify tool found the same video posted online months before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan.
The oldest video AFP found was posted to YouTube on March 25, 2021, in a video called “DJ Bannu Dance”.
The video’s description reads: “#DJBannu #Dance #Funny #Music #Culture #Pakistan”.
Bannu is a district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Below is a comparison of the video in misleading social media posts (L) and the YouTube video (R):
India based TV9 Bharatvarsh aired a clip of men dancing with assault rifles and claimed this was the Taliban celebrating after capturing Maidan Wardak. This part of the broadcast was taken down from the channel’s social media accounts, after a Pakistan-based journalist Iftikhar Firdous called out TV9 Bharatvarsh and wrote that the viral video shows marriage in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. “Dancers in the marriage are masquerading,” he claimed.
Unbelievable an Indian Channel is showing a viral video of a marriage in Khyber Paktunkhwa, Pakistan. Dancers in the marriage are masquerading. The anchor is showing them as Taliban celebrating the take over of Maidan in Afghanistan . This is next level bullshit lol. pic.twitter.com/TC18FRLXGd
— Iftikhar Firdous (@IftikharFirdous) August 15, 2021
Several other versions of the video were posted in March and April alongside the claim it was filmed at a wedding party.
-with AFP
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