Fact check: Republicans' false claims about Taliban video

Taliban find US helicopters left in Kabul 0:45

Washington (CNN) -

Numerous Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, promoted a false claim Monday and Tuesday that the Taliban had just executed a man by hanging him from a helicopter.

Cruz and Crenshaw, among other conservatives, shared a video that had been tweeted by a "comedian" who goes by the Twitter name @Holbornlolz.

The somewhat blurry video showed a man hanging from a rope tied to a helicopter.

The "comedian" captioned the video inaccurately: "Taliban hanging someone from a helicopter in Kandahar."

Taliban find US helicopters left in Kabul 0:45

Cruz added his own claim to the comedian's tweet, tweeting: "This gruesome image sums up Joe Biden's disaster in Afghanistan: The Taliban hanging a man from a US Blackhawk helicopter. Tragic. Unimaginable."

Crenshaw also used the video to criticize Biden's withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan, tweeting: "In what the f ***** world was it a good idea to hand over a country to these people?"

Some popular Twitter accounts even made statements about the identity of the person allegedly executed.

Indian journalist Sudhir Chaudhary, who has more than 6 million followers on Twitter, wrote: "The Taliban hang a person, allegedly a US interpreter, from a US Blackhawk helicopter."

Facts first:

No one was executed on the Kandahar helicopter flight featured in the viral videos.

Other images show that the man hanging from the helicopter wore a harness around his body, not a rope around his neck, and that he was moving freely, even appearing to salute.

CNN could not immediately confirm what exactly the harness man was doing.

But Bilal Sarwary, an Afghan journalist who fled the country in the evacuation in late August, tweeted on Tuesday: "The Afghan pilot who was flying is someone I have known for years. He was trained in the United States and in the United Arab Emirates, and He confirmed to me that he was flying the Blackhawk helicopter. The Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install the Taliban flag from the air, but in the end it didn't work. "

The Afghan news agency Aśvaka, which recorded its own video of the helicopter flight, told the Indian fact-checking website Alt News that its team had confirmed that the person hanging from the helicopter "was controlled and hung from the helicopter to fix the flag on the governor's building in Kandahar. "

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Cruz deleted his tweet Tuesday afternoon, after several journalists posted fact-checks on Twitter and CNN contacted his office via email.

In a subsequent tweet, Cruz acknowledged that the claim that the Taliban hung a man from a helicopter "may be inaccurate," although he included the inaccurate video of the "comedian" in his correction tweet.

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The origins of video

The history of brutal executions of the Taliban is well documented.

But there was never any basis for the claims that this particular video depicted a helicopter execution.

When a video of the helicopter flight was posted on a protaliban Twitter account Monday morning, the account, which was suspended by Twitter on Tuesday, offered no indication that there was an execution.

The account's caption was as follows

"Our Air Force! Right now, helicopters from the Islamic Emirate Air Force are flying over the city of Kandahar and patrolling the city."

The "comedian" then posted a video clip taken from the account of counterterrorism analyst Faran Jeffery.

But Jeffrey's caption didn't say anything about an execution either;

he simply wrote: "I swear I don't know what's going on here."

The "comedian" added the caption for the "hanging."

The video then became popular, receiving millions of views on social media, generating inaccurate headlines in the Indian press, and prompting inaccurate tweets from numerous American conservatives.

These conservatives included Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, Congressional candidate Robby Starbuck, commentator Wayne Dupree, Pastor Greg Locke, National Review journalist Jim Geraghty, former congressional candidate Chuck Callesto and Fox News host Sean Hannity and analyst Gregg Jarrett, although Hannity and Jarrett took cover as they claimed the video "appears" to show an execution.

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It is worth noting that the exterior of the helicopter in the video strongly suggests that it had been in possession of the Afghan armed forces before it was taken over by the Taliban, and not abandoned by the US military. In other words, it is it was almost certainly not one of the pieces of equipment left behind by the United States military during the evacuation.

The Pentagon claims that the troops that left left that plane inoperative.

Cruz's office and Smith's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

A Crenshaw spokesman, Justin Discigil, said he would contact CNN for comment on this fact check only if we agreed to his request to do a fact check of other comments made by Biden.

Afghanistan, disinformation, Taliban