FACT CHECK: Video of men firing US machine guns is not linked to Taliban
A video of men firing machine guns is circulating on social media. Users claim that men were firing US-made weapons seized by the Taliban.
By Newsmeter Network Published on 9 Sep 2021 11:47 AM GMT
HYDERABAD: A video of men firing machine guns is circulating on social media. Users claim that men were firing US-made weapons seized by the Taliban.
Users have sarcastically captioned the video as, "Some toys which the Americans left behind in Afghanistan,"
https://www.facebook.com/
FACT CHECK:
The claim is false.
NewsMeter performed a reverse image search using INVID and found a few YouTube videos that carried the same clipping. However, these videos were not posted recently. While one was posted in 2019, the other was posted in 2017. Another search led to an article by Yahoo Finance that was also posted in 2017.
"In the footage claimed to have been taken in Iraq, two people shooting with anti-aircraft guns suddenly get under the anti-aircraft gun as the gun rears up," Turkish news website reported in June 2017.
https://www.yenisafak.com/
NewsMeter could not independently verify the location of the video. However, since it has been available on the Internet since 2017, it is clear that it is not linked to the ongoing Afghanistan crisis.
Thus, the claim is false.
