Claim: A video on social media shows Afghan forces shooting down a Pakistan Army helicopter.
Fact: The claim is false because the video shows Kurdish militants shooting at a Turkish helicopter in 2016.
On 15 May 2024, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted a video with the caption, “Afghan forces shot down Pakistan Army Helicopter along the disputed Durand line in Kurram.”
The 32-second-long video shows a man in plain clothes, using a shoulder-fired missile in open fields, shooting at a helicopter.
Fact or Fiction?
To investigate, Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search on the video’s keyframes and found several news articles which had identified that it showed Kurdish militants shooting down a Turkish helicopter in 2016.
An article published by the Turkish news outlet Hurriyet Daily News on 16 June 2016, titled “PKK missiles could down Turkish choppers, police warn”, features a screengrab of the viral video. It states that the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) had shot down a Turkish military helicopter in the province of Hakkari on 13 May 2016.
The Sun reported on the same incident on 16 May 2016, adding that the video in question shows, “a Kurdish militant shooting down a Turkish helicopter with a surface-to-air missile.” According to this report as well, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was responsible for the attack.
A report by the Daily Mail UK also confirmed that the video shows a “dramatic moment Kurdish fighters down a helicopter with missile”.
Furthermore, when Soch Fact Check conducted a keyword search with “Afghan forces attack on Pakistan”, we did not find any credible news source reporting that Afghanistan had carried out an operation against Pakistani forces recently. Therefore, we cannot confirm if such an incident took place.
Virality
On X, the video was mostly shared by accounts seemingly of Indian origin. In particular, one post by X user Baba Banaras, although using the word “symbolic video”, received 207.8K views, 2,900 likes and 640 reposts. Similar posts can be seen here, here and here.
Conclusion: The video of a man shooting down a helicopter with a shoulder missile does not show Afghan forces attacking a Pakistani army helicopter. The original video shows Kurdish militants attacking the Turkish army.
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Background image in cover photo: Tehran Times
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