Nearly 7-Year-Old Video Shared as Combat in Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley

We could trace the video back to 2014, and is being falsely claimed to be from Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan.

The video claims to be from Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A video claiming to show Afghanistan's Opposition leader Ahmad Massoud-led National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRFA) resisting Taliban forces in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan is being shared on social media.

However, we found that the video could be traced back to 2014 and doesn't show the current situation in the Panjshir Valley.

CLAIM

The video shared by a user on Twitter claims it to be from Panjshir Valley. Posted on 1 September, the video had over 1 lakh views at the time of writing this article.

An archive of the tweet can be found here.

Another video uploaded on YouTube on 2 September had garnered over 13,000 views.

Archived links of the video shared with similar claims can be seen here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

We looked at the comments of the video and one user had replied adding a video link saying the video was from Yemen in 2019.

The video was posted by Saudi Arabia based news channel 'Al Hadath' on YouTube on 8 May 2019.

Next, using Google Chrome's InVid WeVerify extension, we extracted several keyframes from the video and performed a reverse image search on each of them.

A Google reverse image search results led us to the video published on YouTube in 2014.

The title of the video read: "Iran border guard ambushing PJAK terrorists'. The Kurdistan Free Life Party, or PJAK, is a militant Kurdish leftist anti-Iranian government group.

Although, we couldn't independently verify the exact location of the video, it is confirmed that the video has existed on the internet for the past seven years.

It must be noted that on 6 September, the Taliban said that Panjshir Valley, which has remained free of the Taliban control so far, has been "completely captured". However, the NRFA has denied these claims.

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