Fact-Check: Video of girl firing a machine gun in the new Taliban regime is old

On September 1, 2021, a video of a little girl firing a machine gun and smiling with glee was posted by a handle called @TheZaiduLeaks with the caption “Mashallah, who say Afghan children have no future under the new Taliban regime. Proud moment for Indian Liberals & Shahid Afridi as the Taliban coming in Afghanistan is the greatest victory of ummah.”

The handle has 74,000 followers on Twitter and the video has garnered 13,000 views in less than 24 hours.

Comments on the video suggest that they believe in the claim.

Fact-Check:

Upon reverse searching the key frames of this video we discovered that this video is at least a year old. We found that this video was posted by a YouTube channel on February 16,2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ja6eWKdPc

Additionally, the handle @Natsecjeff also confirmed that this video was taken from a random Afghan TG Channel.

Therefore this claim is false and 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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