Old Image of Unrelated Incident Shared as Taliban’s Brutal Assault on a Woman
Since the return of Taliban to power, several international organizations and international media have raised concerns about isolation of Afghans, human rights violations and restrictions against women rights in the name of governance and restricting women behind four walls of houses. The concerns came after Taliban restricted girls from getting education and imposed strict dress code as well as provisions of strict punishments for not following rules set by the government.
Recently an image of a girl is being widely shared on social media claiming that the girl was tortured by Taliban in jail because she refused to follow the strict dress code of hijab imposed by Taliban.
You can see a social media post below:
The caption of the X (Formally Twitter) reads as:
A girl from Daikundi province of #Afghanistan, who was released from #Taliban prison after 3 days, suffers from mental disorders.
The relatives of this girl said: As soon as her eyes were closed, she screamed, "Don't say anything!"
However, the Fact Crescendo findings show that the social media claims are misleading as the shared image is old and not at all related to any such recent incident of atrocity.
Fact Check:
To find out the truth behind the social media claim and the viral image, we first searched for keywords on Google to find out if any such incident has been recently reported anywhere in Afghanistan in the last few days. We found that last month, some media reports covered news of Afghan women accusing Taliban of Torture and extortion for not following the strict dress code imposed by the Taliban government. However, there was no media report verifying the incident mentioned in the social media post.
For further verification, we applied Google reverse image search on the image shared among social media users. We found that the shared image is not related to any recent incident of torture of an Afghan woman by Taliban. However, the image is actually four years old.
According to an article published by Khamma press on 9 January 2020, the image was of a 17 years old Afghan woman named Laal Bibi, who was admitted to hospital and was under treatment after prolonged violence committed by her husband and in-laws.
Conclusion:
Hence from the investigation, it is clear that image which is being shared on social media is not of any recent incident of torture of Afghan woman by Taliban. The image is of a 4-year-old incident of domestic violence.
