Old videos from Turkey and Pakistan shared as footage of Chattogram flooding
Several videos were recently circulated on Facebook claiming to show flooding in Chattogram. However, a fact-check found that the footage is four to five years old, and none of it was filmed in Bangladesh.
On July 13, a Facebook page named “Ctg News TV” shared a 19-second video. In its Facebook description, the page states that it is “a channel showcasing Chattogram and all of Bangladesh.” During the first eight seconds of the video, muddy floodwater is seen rushing forward at high speed. The remaining 11 seconds show a different scene, where people are moving in panic across a partially damaged or cracked bridge while floodwaters surge rapidly beneath it.
The caption of the post states, “Many houses have been submerged like this in Chattogram.” The video has been viewed more than 300,000 times. The post has received more than 5,000 reactions and has been shared over 550 times. An analysis of the comments shows that most users believed the video is of Chattogram. Some asked which area of Chattogram the footage was from. Others suggested that the video had been generated using artificial intelligence (AI) or that it was filmed in China.
To verify the claim, Dismislab conducted reverse image searches using multiple keyframes from the video’s two different scenes. This led to several reports published by news outlets. Those reports showed that one segment of the footage was filmed in Rize, Turkey, while the other was filmed in Swat Valley, Pakistan.
According to multiple Turkey-based news outlets (1, 2, 3, 4), heavy rainfall on July 21–22, 2021, triggered flash floods and landslides in the Turkish provinces of Rize and Artvin. One of the scenes in the circulating video depicts that event. The reports include photographs and videos filmed from different angles that match both the location and the visuals seen in the recently circulated clip.
Meanwhile, according to news reports, the second part of the video shows flooding in Swat Valley, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, during the August 2022 floods in Pakistan. The reports cited a post by Sherry Rehman, chairperson of the Pakistan Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change and a senior leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. In her verified X account post dated August 27, 2022, she shared a video identifying it as footage of Madyan Bridge in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The scene matches the footage now being circulated as that of flooding in Chattogram.
In other words, the footage being shared as showing flooding in Chattogram is actually old. The two scenes are from separate incidents in Turkey and Pakistan, not Bangladesh.
