Following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, heart-wrenching visuals of Afghanistan citizens desperately trying to flee the war-torn country have flooded social media. Horrifying videos of thousands of men trying to get on flights at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport are all over the internet.
Amidst the chaos, a particular video of a man clinging to the turbine engine of an airplane while it is flying has gone viral on social media with the claim that he is an Afghan citizen trying to flee the Taliban-occupied country.
Several Twitter users too shared the clip with similar claims in their captions. However, following a reverse image search of keyframes of the video by the Logical Indian lead to a similar video on Pinterest with a man sitting on a chair on the same turbine engine. the video is watermarked “Crp: Huy quân hoa”.
A further google search of the watermark led to a YouTube video uploaded on December 17, 2020, by a channel named ‘Quân hoa’. Inthis video, a man can be seen doing various activities like sitting, working, and cooking on the turbine engine of the flying airplane, which demonstrates some fine photoshopping skills.
The about section of the YouTube channel is written in Vietnamese text, which when translated to English, reads as, “Channel specializing in interesting Vlog videos between daily life and many interesting things from Photoshop. This is my official channel, no sub-channels.”
Therefore, it can be concluded that the viral video which claims to be of an Afghan man clinging to the turbine engine of a flying airplane is fake and just a product of photoshop skills.
