Claim: A clip shows ex-Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Jehangir Karamat speaking out against Field Marshal Asim Munir.
Fact: The person addressing the media in the video is former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan Shamshad Ahmad, while the picture of an elderly gentleman at the bottom of the reel is of Retired Brigadier Mian Mahmud.
On 28 March 2025, a user on Facebook posted a reel that allegedly showed ex-Chief of Army Staff Jehangir Karamat speaking out against the current Field Marshal of the country, Syed Asim Munir. The video shows a person likely addressing the media.
It begins with him talking about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and how he managed to sway the country’s army to stand against the whole population of then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). He claims that the same type of authoritarian ruler, like Bhutto, can be found in the country’s current political landscape within political parties that have amassed a large amount of wealth. The person then recalls a “prophecy” / “prediction” (“پیشِین گوئی”) made by Indian politician Jawaharlal Nehru that Pakistan will end up as only a “culturally autonomous entity” and how the current political leaders of Pakistan have fulfilled that statement.
The country’s sovereignty, according to him, was handed over to the United States by a military general who is no longer in service now
(“وہ فوجی جرنیل تھا جو اب چلا گیا ہے”). He then concludes by saying that no one individual should have the power to decide the fate of a whole country.
The frame of the reel also includes a strip of pictures at the bottom:
From right to left (indicated by the arrows in red): a portrait of an army official is circled in red, which leads to a photo of an unknown elderly person. Next to this image, a circled portrait of Field Marshal Asim Munir is at the centre of the strip. It is followed by another one of the same portraits of the military official, while the last image on the extreme-left is likely that of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Fact or Fiction?
We first identified the army official whose image is included twice in the strip at the bottom of the reel. Suspecting that it actually did show former COAS Jehangir Karamat, we ran a Google search for the name. This resulted in multiple photos of him that exactly matched the ones at the bottom of the reel. These are shown below:
The next question we tackled was the identity of the person speaking in the video in the claim. An initial reverse-image search of the keyframes of the video did not provide any credible results. We then analyzed the video’s details and noticed a logo in the left corner of the frame that read “current politics”:
Seeing that this may be the logo for a YouTube channel, we searched for “current politics” on the platform and came across a channel with the same name and logo:
Scrolling through its home page, we saw the channel had posted a similar video to the one in the claim—a longer version running a little over eight minutes. The video is captioned in Urdu as follows:
“…سابق آرمی چیف جنرل جہانگیر کرامت میدان میں آگئے !عاصم منیر میری بات کان کھول کر سنو ! ہم وردی پہن”
This reads in English as:
“Former Army Chief General Jehangir Karamat came out in the open! Asim Munir, listen to me with open ears! We wear the uniform…”
The video first shows four back-to-back clips of the man in the video in the claim and another elderly gentleman in a dark blue shirt, both of whom appear to be addressing the same press conference. Both men are shown below:
While the caption of the video claims it shows former General Karamat speaking, it is unclear which of these two people it refers to. The narrator refers to both people only as retired generals. We also noted that the elderly person in the dark blue shirt was the same individual whose picture was included in the bottom-strip of the reel in the claim (the second picture from the right).
Between 0:35–1:05 and 7:28–8:06, a voiceover explains that two retired generals of the Pakistan Army spoke against the current Field Marshal. From 1:05–4:35, the man in the dark blue shirt addresses the conference and claims that he wrote a letter to Asim Munir, along with other army veterans, to request a meeting with him. He had hoped to discuss the widening gap between the military and the country’s population and how to tackle it. However, he added, Munir completely disregarded this letter. Then, from 4:36–8:06, the man in the reel in the claim addresses the media.
To find out if either of these men were indeed the ex-Chief of Army Staff Jehangir Karamat, we looked for other instances of these men on X (formerly Twitter). Searching for “Jehangir Karamat”, we came upon several posts from March 2025 that shared a video of the elderly man in a dark blue shirt addressing a press conference. The posts claimed the video showed the ex-COAS Karamat. Running a reverse-image search of this video, we found a video from April 2023 posted by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)’s official TikTok channel, which showed the same gentleman addressing a press conference. The embedded caption of the video read in Urdu:
“ریٹائرڈ فوجی سربراہان کی عمران خان سے ملاقات کے بعد میڈیا سے گفتگو”
This reads in English as:
“Retired army officials talk to media after meeting Imran Khan”
Thinking that PTI’s official pages might have more information about this person, we conducted keyword searches for “retired army”, “veteran”, “brigadier”, and “retired general” on PTI’s official X page. This led us to a video posted on 15 May 2023, captioned “Brigadier Mahmood senior most veteran of Pak Army” that showed the same elderly gentleman:
Searching for “Retired Brigadier Mian Mahmud” on Google led us to two videos in which the Brigadier was being interviewed, proving that he was not the ex-Chief of Army Staff Jehangir Karamat.
As for the other person speaking in the video (the one shown speaking in the reel in the claim), we searched for “Retired military officers Imran Khan press conference” (taking cues from PTI’s post on TikTok). This led us to a video by Capital TV from 14 April 2023 titled “Ex military officers held press conference after meeting with Imran Khan outside Zaman Park”. The video shows a number of former army officers, including retired Brigadier Mian Mahmud who is seen standing in front of the mics.
The man on Brigadier Mahmud’s left introduces himself as Ali Kulli Khan, President of the Veterans of Pakistan organisation. The man speaking in the reel in the claim can be seen on Ali Kulli Khan’s left. At 0:18, Khan introduces him as a “general” of the foreign service
(“پلس ہمارے فورن سروس کے بھی جرنیل ہیں”) and addresses him as “Shamshad Sahab”. The picture below shows him beginning his speech near 6:40:
Searching on Google for “Shamshad Foreign Service Pakistan” we were led to images of Shamshad Ahmad, the ex-Foreign Secretary of Pakistan from 1997–2000. These images (shown below) match the facial features of the person shown in the frame above, and in the video being-fact-checked:
This confirmed that the video in the claim does not show the ex-Chief of Army Staff Jehangir Karamat, but former Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad.
Reviewing the full version of the video in the claim also clarified that Shamshad Ahmad was not referring to the incumbent Field Marshal Asim Munir in his speech. Rather, he likely referred to former Field Marshal General Ayub Khan when he spoke of a military general who is no longer in service now (“وہ فوجی جرنیل تھا جو اب چلا گیا ہے”) and was responsible for handing over Pakistan’s sovereignty to the United States. Before Ahmad made his way to the podium, retired Brigadier Mahmud explicitly blamed the late Ayub Khan for strengthening US hegemony over Pakistan in the 1950s. He claimed that US hegemony exists to this day, to the extent that the country’s policies are made according to the will of the US. In light of this context, Ahmad was likely referring to Ayub Khan in his speech as well.
Virality
On Facebook, the video in the claim was shared here and here.
On TikTok, it was found here.
On Instagram, it was found here.
On X, claims about retired Brigadier Mahmud being Jehangir Karamat were found here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: The reel is from a longer media briefing from April 2023, and it shows the former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan Shamshad Ahmad addressing a press conference outside Zaman Park. The claim that the video shows former COAS Jehangir Karamat is false.
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Background image in cover photo: The Harvard Gazette
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