Visuals from a feature film shared as Taliban torturing people in Panjshir - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
September 15, 2021
A video accompanied by a post is being widely shared on social media claiming that the visuals show the Taliban arresting and torturing people in Panjshir. The post even claims that hundreds of people in Panjshir are being thrown into containers and shot at. Let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Taliban torturing people and throwing them into containers in Panjshir.
Fact: The video is taken from a feature film ‘Abhara’ (uploaded to YouTube on 29 December 2017), also known as ‘Taliban’, that depicts the violence and crimes of the dark period of the Taliban. Panjshir province in Afghanistan, which was the last hold out against Taliban, was overrun by the Taliban earlier and is being run brutally ever since, imposing a blockade in Panjshir, denying residents food, and carrying out extrajudicial killings. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
Taking the cue from comments made under the post, that the video could be from an Afghan movie; a reverse image search using relevant keywords was done on the screenshots of the video. A YouTube video uploaded on 29 December 2017 was found with similar visuals. Visuals from 47:11 timestamp onwards were taken from the YouTube video and made into the viral video.
According to the description, this YouTube video is a feature film ‘Abhara’, also known as ‘Taliban’, that depicts the violence and crimes of the dark period of the Taliban. “The story of the film depicts the crimes of the Taliban from Kabul to the borders of Afghanistan in Amu Darya.”
Panjshir province in Afghanistan, which was the last hold out against the Taliban, was overrun by the Taliban earlier and is being run brutally ever since. According to a Washington Post report, the Taliban have imposed a blockade in Panjshir, denying residents food and carrying out extrajudicial killings. The Taliban have been accused of killing 20 civilians, with one incident of killing a man in uniform caught on video.
To sum it up, visuals from a feature film are being shared as those of Taliban torturing people in Panjshir.