Viral video does not show funeral procession of Afghanistan earthquake victims; is AI-generated

The iVerify Pakistan team reviewed this content and determined that it is false.

To reach this conclusion, iVerify Pakistan conducted a reverse image search to find the original source and analysed the video.

Posts from multiple users and Afghan activists on social media platform X on September 2, 2025, shared a video that allegedly showed scores of people carrying bodies wrapped in white shrouds and walking through the street after the recent earthquake that jolted Afghanistan’s Kunar province. However, the clip is AI-generated and has been shared since before the quake.

On Sept 1, a 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck the country just before midnight, killing over 1,400 people, with thousands more injured. At a shallow depth of 10 kilometres, the earthquake hit the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar the worst.

More people are feared trapped under rubble, said the Afghan Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian group working in the region. The United Nations coordinator in Afghanistan said the toll was likely to rise.

HOW IT STARTED

On Sep 2, an X account belonging to an Afghan man, who described himself as a journalist in the bio, shared a video of a large group of people carrying bodies wrapped in shrouds through the streets.

The caption of the post said: “This is not Gaza — this is Afghanistan’s Kunar province, where more than 800 people have lost their lives and thousands have been injured just in one night due to a devastating earthquake. Oh God, help us and protect us.

The post garnered 70,700 views and more than 2,000 likes.

The same video was also shared by other X accounts, as can be seen here, here and here, amassing 37,024 views. All of them claimed that the clip showed scenes from Afghanistan.

The clip was shared on other social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube too, as can be seen here, here and here.

METHODOLOGY

A fact-check was initiated to determine the veracity of the claim due to its virality, increasing circulation and the public interest in the earthquake in Afghanistan.

Observing the video showed subtle inconsistencies such as jerky movements, flickering edges and strange object behaviour, all of which are common in deepfake videos.

At the six-second mark, a man could be seen vanishing suddenly.

Running the video on several AI detection tools showed that it was fake. According to Attestiv, the clip had a technical suspicion rating of 71.

Similarly, Decopy AI also flagged the clip to have an 83.6 per cent probability of being “artificial”.

A reverse image search showed that the video was as old as last month and was shared on social media previously with claims that it showed the funeral of people killed in the recent floods in Buner and Swat, as can be seen here, here, here, here and here.

A keyword search did not yield any credible news reports that ran the viral clip in association with the Afghan earthquake.

FACT-CHECK STATUS: FALSE

The claim that a viral video shows a funeral procession in the aftermath of the Sept 1 earthquake in Afghanistan is false.

The video is a deepfake and AI-generated.