Fact Check: Performance art in London shared as auction of women in Afghanistan
A video showing men dressed as sheiks selling chained women in a market as sex slaves has surfaced.
By Satya Priya BN Published on 17 Aug 2021 1:04 PM GMT
Hyderabad: After the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist organisation, sieged the capital city of Afghanistan, Kabul, utter chaos reigned in the country whose ripples were felt around the world. Many videos are in circulation showing the plight of the locals crowding the airports to flee the country. Some videos also show Taliban fighters marrying Afghan women.
A video showing men dressed as sheiks selling chained women in a market as sex slaves has surfaced. This video is shared with a claim in Hindi that when translated read, 'Time does not take long to change. Those who were said that Hindu sisters, daughters, and daughters-in-law were being sold for two dinars, those people are selling themselves in the same market today.'
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Fact Check:
The claim that the viral video is a recent incident from Afghanistan is FALSE.
When NewsMeter extracted keyframes from the video and searched using Google, we found a video on various platforms with the caption "London, Sale of women"
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Using these keywords along with the keyframes fetched several news reports by international media outlets published in 2014. The video belonged to a mock auction of women by Muslim men. It was performance art in an attempt to show the 'Islamic State sex slave market' staged by Kurdish activists in 2014.
According to a report published by Huffington Post in 2016, The group 'Compassion 4 Kurdistan' were responsible for the stunt where a man declares: "We have four women for you here today and we are here to sell them courtesy of the Islamic State."
Another article by the Huffington Post stated, the protest saw a group of chained veiled women being led in front of the Houses of Parliament, Leicester Square and Downing Street - where costumed men urged the public to bid on them.
"This happens every day in Iraq and Syria. We are bringing it to you," a man can be heard saying as four chained women scream desperately for help.
According to an article published in the BBC in 2014, the video showed the group's supposed ringleader shouting into a microphone. Behind him stood a group of women - all of them actors - fully covered and chained together. "We have four women for you here today," the man announces, "And we are here to sell them courtesy of the Islamic State."
Shot on 14 October, the stunt was organised by 'Compassion 4 Kurdistan', a group of Kurdish diaspora trying to raise awareness of the atrocities of ISIS in Iraq. It has now been viewed more than 2,50,000 times on YouTube. On the same night, the group performed the scene outside Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament as well.
Therefore, the video seen is a mock auction done by Kurdish activists on the streets of London. The claim that it shows the recent situation in Afghanistan is FALSE.
