No, this video does not show Russians angered by a flag-burning incident in Indonesia

This article is more than one year old.
Published on November 22, 2018 at 11:00
2 min read
By AFP Indonesia

A Facebook post features a video that it claims shows a group of Russians angered by an Islamic flag-burning incident in Indonesia in 2018. The clip is not related to the Indonesian incident as it can be traced back to a YouTube video shot in the Russian republic of Dagestan five years before the flag burning.

The clip shows a group of men walking by a long line of cars with black flags that appear to display Arabic words. Cars honking can be heard in the video.

The one-minute clip has a title that, when translated to English, says: “Russians angered by the burning of a tauhid flag by Banser which thought it was an Hizbut Tahrir flag.”

A tauhid is an Islamic holy verse. Banser is the youth wing of Indonesia's biggest Muslim group, Nahdlatul Ulama. Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia was a Islamic hardliner group that Indonesian authorities banned.

The misleading video was viewed more than 37,000 times in the first three weeks after being posted to Facebook on October 29, 2018.

The clip refers to a real event in late October, 2018, in Indonesia when some Banser members publicly burned a flag that they believed carried the logo of the now-defunct Hizbut Tahrir group.

The incident sparked an angry response among some Muslim groups that saw it as blasphemous.

Here is an article in the Indonesian newspaper The Jakarta Post about that controversy.

While the incident is real, the Facebook post claiming an angry reaction by some Russians is false as it uses an old video from Russia.

AFP’s examination using clip keyframes from InVID found that the misleading Facebook post clip can also be seen in a video uploaded to YouTube on April 27, 2013 -- more than five years before the flag-burning incident.

Below is the 2-minute, 13-second video.

The YouTube video a titled that, translated to English, says: “Stopping an Islamic wedding in Kizlyar”, referring to a town in Dagestan near the border with Chechnya.

Dagestan and Chechnya are Muslim-majority republics inside Russia.

A road sign in the video also confirms it is one kilometer from Kizlyar.

The Facebook clip was cut from the second half of the original video, starting from exactly minute 1:05 of the latter. The comparison between the two can be seen in snapshots below.

Snapshots of the misleading Facebook video (left) and the Dagestan video posted in 2013 (right)

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