A video showing uniformed men beating and kicking people is viral on social media with the claim that the Indian army is persecuting Kashmiri Muslims.

The complete message circulated with the video reads, “Please send this to all the people you know around the world to show them what the Indian ARMY is doing to the kashmiri Muslims.”

Please send this to all the people you know around the world to show them what the Indian ARMY is doing to the kashmiri Muslims.

Posted by Muhammad Shafi on Monday, 16 September 2019

A 10-minute clip of the same video is massively viral on Facebook.

10-year-old incident from Pakistan

A reverse image search of one of the frames of the video led us to the same clip uploaded on YouTube in 2009. It was described as, “Pak Army brutally torturing young & old Muslim Pushtoons in Swat”

Taking this as a clue, we time-searched for news reports on Google. According to a BBC report published on October 1, 2009, “Pakistani soldiers are seen apparently abusing Taliban suspects in a 10-minute video…It is not clear who shot the film or where. It appears to have been made recently, perhaps in the Swat valley. Pakistan’s army has said it needs to examine the video before commenting.”

The incident was also reported by Al Jazeera which said, “He [the man getting beat up] screams “Have mercy on me, oh God” in Pashto, the language of the northwestern tribal areas close to the Afghan border where the Pakistan army is engaged in anti-Taliban offensives.” The alleged incident was also reported by The Guardian.

Since the abrogation of key provisions of Article 370, several old videos originating from Pakistan have been shared to falsely depict brutality by the Indian army in Kashmir.
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About the Author

Pooja Chaudhuri is a senior editor at Alt News.