Claim: A photograph shows two men sitting atop what appears to be the ruins of a brick house that was destroyed by heavy flooding amid the recent unprecedented monsoon rains in Pakistan.
Fact: The image is more than a decade old when, in August-September 2011, flood waters entered Badin, near Hyderabad in the Sindh province of Pakistan. The caption accompanying the photograph is in the Saraiki language, which gives the wrong impression that it shows the devastation from the 2022 flooding in South Punjab.
On 28 August 2022, Facebook page ‘پنجابی صوفی کلام PaNjaBi SuFi KaLaM’ posted a picture of two men sitting cross-legged on top of a destroyed house following the devastating floods in Pakistan in 2022. The caption, which includes the hashtag “#flood2022,” is a verse in Saraiki:
“ساکوں وسدے ویلھے ڈیکھیں ہا۔۔
ساڈی جھوک وی ہئی ساڈے یار وی ہن
[It says you should have seen us living in the good times,
we had a lot of friends and a lot of respect]”
This summer, Pakistan was hit by catastrophic flooding, which has rendered millions homeless and destroyed entire villages. The disaster, which many say is due to climate change and bad government policies, has left a third of the South Asian nation submerged.
Soch Fact Check has previously investigated other misleading and false images going viral on social media, such as this picture of a child carrying a dog in a steel bowl and this video claiming to show giant waves destroying an apartment in Karachi.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check used reverse image search tools to ascertain the image’s origin. We found an article on The Atlantic, published 20 September 2011 under the byline of Alan Taylor — the publication’s senior editor who runs its ‘Photo’ section — and archived here.
The image is accompanied by the caption, “Pakistani men sit on the rubble of a house, surrounded by flood water in Badin district near Hyderabad, Pakistan, on September 18, 2011. AP Photo/Shakil Adil”.
We then accessed The Associated Press’ image gallery and found the same image when we searched for “Pakistan” and limited our search to September 2011. The AP’s caption is as follows:
“Pakistani men sit on the rubble of a house, surrounded by floods water in Badin district near Hyderabad, Pakistan, Sunday, Sept. 18, 2011. The floods caused by heavy rains have killed more than 200 people, made about 200,000 people homeless and left 4.2 million acres of agriculture land inundated with water, authorities said. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil).”
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for a seven-day period from 30 August 2022 to 6 September using the search term, “ساکوں وسدے ویلھے ڈیکھیں ہا۔۔ ساڈی جھوک وی ہئی ساڈے یار وی ہن”.
The search turned up more than 3,300 interactions across close to 40 Facebook posts. We also found the picture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here on Facebook. The image also appears here on Twitter.
Conclusion: The photograph is, in fact, from the 2011 floods in Sindh, when water entered the Badin district. The caption of the image is in Saraiki, giving the incorrect impression that it shows the devastation from the 2022 flooding in South Punjab.