A digitally created video shared as visuals of Afghan citizens escaping by hanging onto the wings of a flying Aircraft - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
August 20, 2021
A video is being shared on social media claiming it as the visuals of Afghan citizens holding onto aircraft wings and escaping from the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In a desperate attempt to escape the Taliban rule, a few Afghanistan citizens clung to the moving US military plane on 16 August 2021. Several news channels released the footage of Afghans falling from the moving airplane. In the wake of this tragic incident, this post is being shared on social media. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Afghan citizens holding onto the wings of an aircraft and escaping from the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Fact: The video shared in the post is a digitally created one. This video was created by the Vietnam-based graphic designer, Huy Xuân Mai. This video has nothing to do with the recent incident of Afghan citizens falling off from the moving US military plane. Hence, the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
On reverse image search of the screenshots in the video, a video with similar visuals was found in an article published on 27 August 2020. This article reported that the visuals in the video are digitally created by Vietnam-based graphic designer, Huy Xuân Mai. A few other digitally created videos of Huy Xuân Mai were also shared in this article.
When we searched for more sources using these keywords, we found that on 17 August 2020, Huy Xuân Mai shared the same video on his Facebook page. Huy Xuân Mai shared multiple videos on his YouTube channel where we could see similar visuals of a person cooking on a plane, working with a computer, and sleeping on a plane.
Several news websites have published articles by sharing the edited videos and morphed images created by Huy Xuân Mai. They can be seen here, here, and here. While it is true that Afghan citizens made a desperate attempt to climb on the moving US Military plane, this particular video is a digitally created one and has nothing to do with the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.
To sum it up, a digitally created video is shared as visuals of Afghan citizens escaping by hanging onto the wings of a flying aircraft.