“This is what Indian army forces do to Kashmiri women’s in front of her father. #Kashmiratrocities #IndianBrutality,” – a video has been circulated on social media with this caption to portray an Indian army man thrashing a burqa-clad Kashmiri woman with a whip. It was posted on January 24 from a Facebook page Kashmir Headlines and received over 80,000 views. The video includes an inflammatory audio commentary in the background where a man can be heard asking Muslim youth to unite against the torture.

Viral video #kashmir This is what Indian army forces do to Kashmiri women’s in front of her father.

#Kashmiratrocities #IndianBrutality Posted by Kashmir Headlines on Thursday, 24 January 2019

The video was also shared by a few other pages on Facebook.

From what it seems, it was viral in Kashmir last month.

The video had also been shared on Twitter with the identical narrative of brutality by India armed forces on a Kashmiri woman.

2015 video from Syria

Alt News broke the video into multiple frames using InVid software. Upon reverse-searching individual frames on Yandex, we found a website – doamuslims.org – which carried a still from the same video in 2015. The website described the atrocity as – “Syrian army officer torturing an old man and his wife.”

Alt News used Yandex once again to reverse-search the still and landed on multiple reports from 2015 which ascribed the incident to Syria.

Middle-eastern news channel Al Jazeera was among the media organisations that reported the incident. Its August 6, 2015 article, published in Arabic, also contains a longer version of the video. The original video does not contain any audio commentary but the man and the woman can be heard screaming. The screenshot below shows the report’s headline translated to English by Google translate.

According to the article, activists circulated the video to reveal atrocities of the Syrian army on the country’s women. The man using a whip was described as a member of the Syrian government’s National Defense Forces (NDF).

It is, thus, clear that an old video from Syria was viral in India as the Indian army’s atrocities on Kashmiri women. Last year, another piece of misinformation was used to target the Indian army in a similar manner. The images of injured Pashto actress Neelam Gul were circulated as Indian army’s brutality on Kashmiri women.

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