Claim: A violent video of a man being beaten up in a river, with his hands and feet tied together, is from the recent attacks on the Shia community in Parachinar.
Fact: The video is old; it emerged online as early as 2021 and is, therefore, unrelated to the recent unrest in Parachinar.
Parachinar Attacks
According to authorities, at least 42 people were killed in an attack on a convoy of passenger vehicles carrying Shia pilgrims from Parachinar to Peshawar on 21 November 2024.
Parachinar is located in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kurram district, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The district has had a long history of sectarian violence and land disputes between the Shia and Sunni communities, and tensions have escalated since July 2024.
Between 21 November and 1 December, the death toll from the clashes reached 130 and hundreds others were wounded, according to official reports.
Fact or Fiction?
The day following the attack, a video of a man beating up another man in a river emerged on social media, with users claiming that it was from Parachinar and the victim was being beaten due to sectarian discrimination. The video is a 30-second clip with a ‘Noha’ — devotional poetry recited by Shia Muslims — playing in the background.
A Facebook user posted the video on 22 November with the caption:
مجھے علی ع کی محبت میں مارا گیا ہے
میرا قصور علی ع کا شیعہ ہونا تھا زخمی ہونے کے بعد بے دردی سے شہید کر دیا “
[#Parachinar
I was killed for my love for Ali. My fault was that Ali was Shia. After being beaten up, I was brutally murdered]
The caption implies that the victim was killed during the recent spate of sectarian violence in Parachinar. The video was shared by users on Facebook with similar claims and on X (formerly Twitter) by the news outlet AbbTakk, which also shared the video implying that it was from Parachinar.
Soch Fact Check conducted a fact-check to verify the origins of the video.
We broke down keyframes of the video using InVid and ran a Google Reverse Image search. The search propped up posts that had shared the same video at different times over the past three years.
Most recently, in September 2024, a longer version of the video was shared on X (formerly Twitter) by human rights activist and author Zarifa Ghafari who claimed that it is from Afghanistan. In this version of the video, we can hear the man interrogating his victim.
In the past, on 9 September 2021, the video was shared on X (formerly Twitter) by an Afghan journalist, Bilal Sarwary, who posted, “Water-boarding Taliban style. Hands and feet chained and tied. There are genuine concerns about revenge and grievances at a village and district level- especially [for] the families of government officials and soldiers living inside Afghanistan.”
On the same day, author and columnist Tarek Fateh also shared the video, captioned, “This is the real face of #Taliban. Watch their human rights violations as they torture their opponents in raw sewage.”
This came soon after the US withdrew troops from Afghanistan, and the Taliban took over the country.
Soch Fact Check then asked a Pashto speaker to explain what is being said in the video.
According to our translator, the man in the white kurta [the aggressor] is interrogating the other about a murder in his village. “Tell me who killed him or I will drown you in this water till death,” he says.
“Who told you I killed him?” replies the victim, to which the aggressor says, “I saw you there,” and continues to torture him for an answer.
In the video shared in the claim, the audio of a Noha drowns out the original audio where the man can be heard interrogating the other man for murder. However, there is still no clear indication whether he is a member of the Afghan Taliban.
While Soch Fact Check was unable to ascertain the exact location and time of the incident, or if the video is associated with the Afghan Taliban, we can confirm that it predates the recent spate of sectarian violence in Parachinar. The video is certainly not from November 2024 as it was posted online as far back as 2021.
Virality
The video was associated with the Afghan Taliban and widely shared with this claim in the past. However, it went viral once again with the claim that it shows the recent violence against the Shia community in Parachinar. A reverse-image search on Google as well as a Facebook search, using keywords from the caption, revealed many posts with the claim.
The claim was shared on Instagram and YouTube here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. On Facebook, the claim was shared here, here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: The video of a man brutally beating up a person in a river is not from the November 2024 attacks on the Shia community in Parachinar. It has appeared on the internet many times over the past three years with the claim that it shows the Afghan Taliban.