Fact Check: Old video falsely shared as Indian Army raising white flag after Operation Sindoor
Old and unrelated video of firing at LoC in Haji Pir sector in 2019 falsely claims the Indian Army raised white flag to collect bodies after Operation Sindoor while the fact is it was Pakistani soldiers who were shown in the viral video
Hours after India launched precision military strikes against terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), the Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said the Indian Armed Forces targetted only those who killed 26 civilians in Pahalgam's Baisaran meadow.
The Defence Minister saluted the bravery of Indian Armed Forces for destroying the terrorists’ camps and their infrastructure. He added that ‘Operation Sindoor’ broke the morale of the terrorists.
Meanwhile, social media users from the other side are relentlessly spreading misinformation by sharing old and unrelated videos to confuse the netizens.
Sharing one such video, a user from Pakistan claimed that the Indian Army raised a white flag to collect its casualties. The caption of the viral post in Urdu is “لائن آف کنٹرول پر انڈین آرمی سفید جھنڈے لہرا کر جہنم واصل ھوئےفوجیوں کی لاشیں اٹھا رہے ہیں۔
#سندور_بن_گیا_تندور”
When translated, it says “the Indian Army raised white flags on the Line of Control to retrieve the bodies of their soldiers.”
The viral claim link is here and the archive link here.
Here’s the screenshot of the viral post.
Fact Check:
During the investigation, the Telugupost fact check team found the claim made in the viral post was found to be misleading. It was the Pakistani Army not the Indian Army which raised the white flag and the incident took place in 2019. Notably, white flag is raised to signal peace and truce.
We began our investigation by extracting the keyframes from the viral video and searched each frame using a Google Reverse Image Search tool. The search results showed a mix of tweets, news articles and YouTube videos containing different datelines.
According to the Economic Times article posted on September 19, 2019, “Pakistan military raised the white flag to retrieve bodies of its two soldiers along the LoC in Haji Pir sector of PoK after they were killed by the Indian security personnel during cross border firing.”
In its article posted on June 29, 2020, Hindustan Times reported that the “Pakistan Army has retrieved the bodies of two of its Punjabi soldiers killed recently by the Indian Army at the LoC after raising the white flag.”
It further said that “the first soldier had been killed around 10 September. The other soldier was killed during an attempt to retrieve the dead body.”
When we searched the social media platforms with relevant keywords, we found a tweet posted by ANI news agency on September 14, 2019.
“Hajipur (Haji Pir) Sector: Indian Army killed two Pakistani soldiers in retaliation to unprovoked ceasefire violation by Pakistan. Pakistani soldiers retrieved the bodies of their killed personnel after showing white flag,” ANI wrote.
A further search with different keywords led to a tweet by Gaurav C Sawant, a journalist at India Today. He tweeted that “Pakistan army soldiers display white flag to retrieve bodies of Pak soldiers killed at LoC as the Indian army responds to Pakistan’s ceasefire violation at LoC. Can Pakistanis explain why Pak army retrieves Pak Punjabi soldiers but not the soldiers belonging to Northern Light Infantry (NLI) regiment, Kashmiri, Pasthun and Baloch regiments?”
It is evident that the viral video is old and unrelated to ‘Operation Sindoor’. Additionally, it is not the Indian Army jawans who raised the white flag but the Pakistani soldiers who did it and in the process one of them got killed by the Indian troops as they wanted to take the bodies by force. Hence, the claim is misleading.