A video showing a burqa-clad woman, a sex slave, being auctioned in an open market has been floating on the internet. With the Taliban’s effective take-over of Afghanistan, the video has been shared as showing the condition in the country soon after the Islamic group conquered the presidential palace in Kabul. However, on doing a fact check, Opoyi found this video is not from Afghanistan. 

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Shared by a Sourav3507 on Twitter, the video shows a woman being sold in the open market. A man, a supposed ringleader, in the video can be seen  using a microphone to announce, “We have four women for you here today and we are here to sell them courtesy of the Islamic State.”

“Time does not take long to change. Those who were saying that Hindus’ sister, daughter and daughter-in-law had sold two dinars. Now those people are selling their own in the same market today and they are selling themselves in the same market,” the Twitter user said (translated from Hindi). 

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While the video was retweeted more than 190 times and liked more than 130 times at the time of writing this story, it was also shared on Facebook. 

However, by doing a reverse image search, the video can be traced back to a BBC story published in 2014. The British news organisation says that the video was shot on October 14 that year. It adds that the stunt was organised by Compassion 4 Kurdistan, a group of Kurdish diaspora trying to raise awareness if IS’s alleged actions in Iraq. According to the report, the group performed the scene outside Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament as well. The video put on YouTube was viewed more than 250,000 times as of August 2021. However, it was taken down. 

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The Huffington Post published the story in October 2014. According to the report, the protest was carried out to spark an aggravated reaction, highlighting the crimes ISIS is committing in Iraq and Syria.

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“What we wanted to show is that this could take place in London,” a witness told Huffington Post.

Considering the facts mentioned above, this video has no relation to Taliban’s capturing of Afghanistan.