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Fact Check: Viral Video Shows Taliban Fighter Attached to Helicopter Trying to Put a Flag, Not a Body ‘Hanging’

New Delhi: A video and screenshots of a man ‘hanging’ from a helicopter as the Taliban parades it in the skies of Afghanistan’s Kandahar is going massively viral on social media. The 12-second video clip that has stormed the internet and being claimed that it shows the ‘Taliban flying a US Black Hawk helicopter with a body hanging from it’ has reportedly been misleadingly captioned. The viral video clip shows a chopper hovering over buildings in the city and then the video zooms in to show what appears to be a person hanging from the helicopter by a rope. The video was shared hours after the last US military pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind up to 200 Americans and several hundreds of desperate Afghans.

However, a report by BBC and another one by independent fact-checking organization Alt News has clarified that the man who can be seen dangling from a rope is a Taliban fighter and is very much alive. And, as per multiple Afghan news outlets with reporters on the ground, the Taliban fighter was in fact trying to hoist a flag on the governor’s office in Kandahar.

“Further footage and still photographs show that the man flying over the city of Kandahar is very much alive. These images show him wearing the Blackhawk helicopter’s diver’s winch and waving the Taliban flag,” said the BBC report.

Speaking to the BBC, several Afghanistan experts, quoting Taliban sources, have said that the hovering chopper was taken out as an attempt to fix a flag over a public building using their newly-captured US-built equipment.

Here are some tweets related to the helicopter hovering over Kandahar with a Taliban fighter:


The video clip that has racked up over 2 million views in just over one day was originally tweeted by a counterterrorism expert who has reportedly said that he wasn’t sure what it depicted. And then, the claim of the Taliban using a U.S.-supplied helicopter to hang someone post the departure of US troops from Afghan soil has been spreading like wildfire across social media.

Meanwhile, a local journalist Sadiqullah Afghan has also tweeted one of the videos that showed a man suspended from a helicopter. He informed that the man was a Talib and was trying to put a flag on a 100-meter pole.


Another Afghan journalist tweeted that he is acquainted with the Afghan pilot who was flying the Black Hawk helicopter. He confirmed that the man suspended from the chopper was a Taliban fighter attempting to install the Taliban flag from air but failed.

Even, an editor and fact-checker from The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler has tweeted about how the whole narrative was twisted on the internet. Have a look:

US-trained helicopter winch operators usually wear the loop at the back and in poor quality video footage, it could easily be mistaken for a noose. And, we are guessing that’s what happened with this viral video clip. However, the British RAF, Royal Navy, and HM Coastguard divers wear the loop to their front.



source https://www.india.com/viral/fact-check-viral-video-shows-taliban-fighter-attached-to-helicopter-not-a-body-hanging-from-us-chopper-video-afghanistan-kandahar-taliban-flag-4926704/

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