FACT CHECK: Old and Unrelated Image Goes Viral As Meeting Between Mullah Baradar and UN Humanitarian Head Martin Griffiths…

Recently, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Taliban regime Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and his delegation met Martin Griffiths, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the foreign Ministry in Kabul. An image tagged with this news is getting widely shared on Twitter.

The image gives an impression the Taliban delegation was greeted by UN officials in a ceremonious manner. However, when we did a fact check on this image, we found that the image has no relation with the incident. It is a two years old image of a meeting between Uzbek Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov and the Taliban delegation. Let’s check the details of the narrative and how we found out the actual context of the viral image.

Viral Image on Social media

Original Post- Twitter   Archive

In the tweet given above, we can see an image of Uzbek Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov meeting with Taliban delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. The caption of the post reads: “Mullah A. Baradar, Deputy Amir, IEA for Political Affairs and Head P.O. and his delegation met Martin Griffithss, UN under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the foreign Ministry in Kabul”. 

The tweet posted on 6^th September has received more than 300 likes and 45 retweets. However, this isn’t the only tweet that has been sharing this unrelated picture in connection to Taliban meeting UN Humanitarian Chief Martin Griffiths. We can see one more such example:

#AmrullahSaleh
Mullah A.Baradar,Deputy-Amir,IEA for Political Affairs and Head,PO and his delegation met Martin Griffithss, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the foreign Ministry in Kabul,today.The UN delegation promised continuation of humanitarian assistance pic.twitter.com/uveZLqtEm3

— Rabia Parveen (@rabiaparveeno) September 6, 2021

Now, let’s see how we found out the actual context of the viral image.

Fact check 

In order to find out the truth about the viral image, we used reverse image search on Google and it turned out that the viral image is a two years old image of a meeting between Minister of foreign affairs of Uzbekistan Abdulaziz Kamilov and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Tashkent. The meeting focused on discussing a peaceful political solution for Afghanistan. We can see the photo and the news published by Ariana News two years ago below:

Read Article here: Ariana News | Archived Link

 It is true that a delegation of the present Taliban government met UN delegation led by under-secretary-general for humanitarian affair, Martin Griffiths on 5^th September in Kabul. The UN delegation spoke with the deputy Prime Minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Mullah Baradar and promised continuation of humanitarian aids to Afghanistan. In return, the IEA delegation promised complete cooperation and provision of essentials needed by UN. 

UN | Archive | TIMES NOW | Archive

Conclusion

From our investigation it is clear that Mullah A. Baradar and his delegation met Martin Griffiths recently, but the viral image is not related to the event. The viral image is a two years old image from a meeting between Uzbekistan minister for foreign affairs, Abdulaziz Kamilov and a Taliban delegation led by Mullah Baradar.