Cruz and Crenshaw, among other conservatives, shared a video that had been tweeted by a self-described “comic” who goes through Twitter handling @Holbornlolz. The video, a bit blurry, showed a man hanging from a rope connected to a helicopter. The “comic” is an inaccurate subtitle of the video: “Taliban hanging someone from a helicopter in Kandahar.”
Cruz added his own statement above the comic’s tweet,
piulant: “This horrible image encapsulates Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe: the Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter. Tragic. Unimaginable.” Crenshaw also used the video to criticize Biden’s withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
piulant: “In what a fantastic world it was a good idea to just give a country to these people.”
Some popular Twitter accounts went so far as to make statements about the identity of the allegedly executed person. Indian journalist Sudhir Chaudhary, who has more than 6 million followers on Twitter,
he wrote, “The Taliban hang a person, allegedly an American interpreter, from an American Blackhawk helicopter.”
CNN could not immediately confirm what exactly the man in the harness was doing. But Bilal Sarwary, a
Afghan journalist who fled the country in the evacuation in late August,
he tweeted Tuesday: “The Afghan pilot who flies is someone I’ve known over the years. He was trained in the US and the UAE, he confirmed to me that he was flying the Blackhawk helicopter. The Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install the Taliban flag from the air, but in the end it didn’t work. ”
The Afghan news agency Aśvaka, which
engraved his own video of the helicopter flight, he told the Indian website Alt News that his team had confirmed that the person attached to the helicopter “was checked and hung from the helicopter to fix the flag in the governor’s building in Kandahar “.
Cruz erased his fake tweet Tuesday afternoon after several reporters posted data checks on Twitter and CNN had contacted his office by email. Cruz
recognized in a later tweet stating that the Taliban were hanging a man from a helicopter “may be inaccurate,” although he included the video with inaccurate subtitles of the “comic” in his correction tweet.
The origins of the video
The history of the brutal executions of the Taliban is well documented. But there was never any basis to claim that this particular video represented an execution of a helicopter.
When a video of the helicopter flight was posted on a pro-Taliban Twitter account on Monday morning, the account – which was suspended by Twitter on Tuesday – offered no indication that there was an execution. The title of the account was, “Our Air Force! Right now, Islamic Emirate Air Force helicopters are flying over the city of Kandahar and patrolling the city.”
The “comic” then released a video clip that was taken from the account of terrorism analyst Faran Jeffery. But Jeffrey’s legend hadn’t said anything about an execution either; he simply
he wrote: “I swear I don’t know what’s going on here.” The “comic” added the title “hung.”
Then the video came out: it received millions of views on social media, generating inaccurate headlines in the Indian press and provoking inaccurate tweets from numerous American conservatives.
It is worth noting that the exterior of the helicopter in the video strongly suggests that it had been in the possession of the Afghan armed forces before the Taliban seized it and was not left behind by the US military. In other words, it was almost certainly not one of the equipment left by the U.S. military during the evacuation. The Pentagon says the marching troops made this plane inoperable.
Cruz’s office and Smith’s office did not immediately respond to Tuesday’s requests for comment. A Crenshaw spokesman, Justin Discigil, said he would return to CNN to comment on this fact check only if we accepted his request to do a fact-checking of separate comments made by Biden.
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