Does footage released after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan show the insurgents using anti-aircraft weaponry? No, that's not true: The footage is from the video game Arma 3.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published by Military Videos on September 6, 2021. It opened:
Anti-aircraft weapons and drones are also suspected to have fallen to the Afghan Taliban..??
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Sep 9 14:34:45 2021 UTC)
The footage came from Arma 3. Lead Stories found similar footage on YouTube. The video in the Facebook post ends with a message in Japanese that roughly translates to:
This video is fiction. The names of the people and groups that appear are fictitious and have nothing to do with real things.
Here is a Google Translate screenshot of the Japanese-to-English translation.
An Indian news channel mistook Arma 3 footage for reality and reported on it as if it were real. We have reached out to Bohemia Interactive, the developers of Arma 3, for a comment. We will update this story if an appropriate response is received.
Lead Stories has debunked other stories that includes video game footage being mistaken for real warfare: here, here and here.
