Fact-Check: Misleading video of Taliban forces in an Afghan palace goes viral

As the situation still develops in Afghanistan, misleading news on a high as everyone seems to want to be a part of this moment in history and add to the conversation.

A video posted by Major Surendra Poonia went viral where he claimed that Taliban forces have entered the Presidential Palace of Afghanistan in Kabul and can be seen sitting in a very opulent setting.

The video has almost 2 lakh videos on Twitter and has been liked by 7,000 people.

Fact-Check:

We broke this video down into individual frames and searched the internet with matching images. Upon some investigation, we found that the video is 4 days old. Since the video is 4 days old when the Taliban had not captured Kabul, we inched towards the conclusion that the image may be false.

We did some more digging around and discovered that the palace shown the video is that of General Dostum’s in Mazar-i-Sharif. The video was taken when Mazar-i-Sharif was captured by the forces a couple of days ago.

Correct video of Taliban inside Afghanistan’s Presidential Palace:

Attached below is the link to the correct video of Taliban forces inside the presidential palace.

Therefore the video posted by Poonia is misleading.

DFRAC Editor

Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) is a non-partisan and independent media organisation which focuses on fact-checking and identifying hate speech. With the popularisation of the internet came the challenge of information overload and often times, our feeds are overpopulated with conflicting, incendiary and false information which is increasingly becoming difficult to ignore and not believe in

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