Claim: A video shows dollars being smuggled out of Pakistan into Afghanistan through the Chaman border.
Fact: The video is from September 2021, when the Taliban claimed to have recovered US dollars and gold bars stashed away at the residence of Amrullah Saleh, the ousted Afghan vice president.
Fact or Fiction?
On 21 December 2022, the Facebook page Human Rights Watch News shared a video claiming that it shows dollars being smuggled out of Pakistan into Afghanistan through the Chaman border.
The Urdu caption of the post translates to, “The reason for the dollar’s rise in Pakistan is its smuggling to Afghanistan through the Chaman border.”
Soch Fact Check found the claim to be false. A Google search with the keywords “dollars and bars of gold found” led to an article published on 13 September 2021 by The Express Tribune. The report titled, “WATCH: Taliban ‘recover bags full of money, gold bars’ from Amrullah Saleh’s house”, featured the same video that is now going viral.
The article suggests the video purportedly shows “millions of dollars and bars of gold being found at the residence of deposed vice president of war-torn Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh by Taliban fighters in Panjshir”.
As Pakistan’s foreign reserves continue to deplete, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has admitted that dollars are being smuggled out of Pakistan on a huge scale via neighbouring countries.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 30-day period leading up to 2 January 2023 using the following search term:
- پاکستان میں ڈالر مہنگا ہونے کا سبب چمن بارڈر سے افغانستان سمگلنگ [The reason for the dollar’s rise in Pakistan is its smuggling to Afghanistan through the Chaman border]
The search term turned up eight posts with 177 interactions. The claim can be found here, here, here, here and here on Facebook.
On Twitter, the claim was shared here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: The video does not show dollars being smuggled out of Pakistan into Afghanistan. In fact, it’s an old video from September 2021 when the Taliban claimed to have recovered US dollars and gold bars from the residence of Amrullah Saleh, the ousted Afghan vice president.