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GOP Claim Taliban Hanged A Man From A Helicopter In Viral Video Gets Quickly Debunked

John Sundholm
Sep. 02, 2021
@Holbornlolz/Twitter

False claims and conspiracy theories seem to be the primary message of GOP. The Trump accord Afghanistan withdrawals has been no exception.

Few images from Afghanistan caused a greater stir than the video scores of Republicans falsely claimed showed the Taliban executing a man by hanging him from a helicopter.

But perhaps unsurprisingly, fact-checking easily proved the Republican pushed narrative to be completely false.


The video has been viewed millions of times in recent days, fueled by conservatives' ghastly claims of an execution by the Taliban using an American Black Hawk helicopter.

Republicans have seized upon the narrative Democratic President Joe Biden is responsible for the grisly scene, like in the tweet below from conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler.


The rumor mill eventually expanded to theorizing who the hanging man was, with one Indian journalist claiming he was an American interpreter in a since-deleted tweet.

Several prominent Republican politicians and media figures, like Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Republican Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw and TV personality Meghan McCain, further amplified the disinformation, sharing it on Twitter to their hordes of followers.

The clip, however, is just one small out-of-context piece of a longer video of the scene obtained by Afghan news agency Aśvaka, which shows clearly the man hanging from the Black Hawk is alive and waving his arms around, as seen below.


The hanging man has been confirmed to be a Taliban soldier waving a Taliban flag, which he is trying to affix to the roof of a government building in the city of Kandahar, according to fact-checking site Snopes, news agency Reuters and the BBC.

But while Senator Cruz did subsequently delete his tweet about the video following the fact-check, several other conservative voices continued sharing it anyway, including Fox News anchor Sean Hannity.

Former Republican President Donald Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. even changed his Twitter banner photo to one mocking Biden for the supposed execution.


On Twitter people were angered, but certainly not surprised by this latest Republican disinformation campaign.











As of this writing, neither Hannity, Crenshaw or McCain have deleted or clarified their false tweets about the helicopter video.