Claim: A video showing missiles being fired shows Pakistan’s retaliatory attack on Iran in January 2024.
Fact: The video is from 2018, and allegedly shows the Indian Army firing artillery.
On 17 January 2024, an X (formerly Twitter) user posted a video (archived) with the caption, “Pak knows how to retaliate. #MissileAttack”
The 20-second video shows armed tanks firing missiles in a desert area, with an unidentified man in uniform standing nearby, with his back to the camera, overlooking the exercise.
On 16 January 2024, Iran launched airstrikes in the Balochistan province of Pakistan targeting bases of the militant group, Jaish al-Adl in which two children were killed and three were injured. Pakistan denounced the attack as a “blatant violation” of its airspace and in retaliation, launched missile strikes into Iran on January 17, killing nine people.
Fact or Fiction?
To investigate, Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search on the video’s keyframes and found a similar video posted on YouTube here on 4 April 2018.
The description of the YouTube video reads, “Indian Army Firing Missile 2018.”
An unverified YouTube channel also posted the same video here on 9 April 2018, titled “Indian Army BM-21 Grad Artillery Firing. ”
Soch Fact Check could not independently verify the origin of the video and whether it depicts the Indian army firing missiles. However, it is verified that the footage is not recent, as the video was posted as far back as 2018. Therefore, it does not show Pakistan’s retaliation attack on Iran, which took place in January 2024.
Virality
On X (formerly Twitter), the same claim received 594.9k views, 2.3k likes and 450 reposts. The archived versions can be seen here and here.
It was also posted here on Facebook.
Conclusion: A video claiming to show Pakistan’s retaliatory attack on Iran from January 2024 is old footage of a missile exercise, shared on YouTube as far back as 2018.
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