Fact Check: Kabul Airport Chaos Video Is Actually From Texas, Not Afghanistan

Footage of horrifying scenes of people attempting to flee Kabul has spread online since the Taliban entered the city.

The Claim

Twitter users have shared a clip that they suggested was from Afghanistan and showed people running through Kabul airport.

The account @uajalsingh tweeted the clip along with the message: "Where is the UN. The superpowers. Why aren't all nations coming together to help them. This is so sad."

They used the hashtag "#kabulairport" in the post.

Another Twitter account—@Conflict_Zones—also shared the video alongside the caption: "Surreal footage from Kabul airport as soon as it opened this morning - Afghanistan"

The first video post mentioned had more than 85,000 views at the time of writing, while the latter had more than 33,000.

The Facts

There were scenes of chaos from people attempting to leave Afghanistan.

Shocking even footage captured people falling from an ascending plane that they had clung onto during its takeoff in a desperate attempt to flee the nation.

However, the footage in the claim section above is not from Kabul. Instead, it is from Arlington, Texas, in 2019.

The video shows people running into the AT&T Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys, an American football team.

The clip was originally shared on Twitter by Jon Machota, who covers the Dallas Cowboys for The Athletic, on January 5, 2019.

It showed fans entering the stadium for a game between the Cowboys and the Seattle Seahawks.

That tweet was later retweeted by Sports Illustrated, which wrote: "AT&T stadium looks like Black Friday before the internet existed."

The footage has been viewed more than 11 million times.

It is not the first video shared online where the footage has been taken out of context and falsely said to be from Kabul.

For example, footage purportedly of citizens welcoming the Taliban into the capital city was not actually from there, as Newsweek previously reported. The clip was from Kandahar, the city from which the Taliban was born.

Evacuations from Afghanistan are ongoing and the U.S. administration is facing questions over the Taliban's rapid recapture of the country.

President Joe Biden had set an August 31 withdrawal deadline for American forces and his administration had underestimated the speed with which the Taliban would take control again.

The Ruling

False.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK

The video in question is not from Kabul as it is claimed.

It originally spread online in 2019 and is from the AT&T stadium in Arlington.