Claim
An old video showing military personnel rescuing women from a camp has resurfaced with a false claim that it shows the UN Army raiding a base of the Islamic State (ISIS) and liberating 38 Indian girls enslaved for sex. The video has been revived linking it to the film 'The Kerala Story'. The video is being shared with the caption, "The UN Army stormed an ISIS base and rescued 38 girls from India, enslaved for sex. Look at the way the girls had been chained, to be used at will. For those who claim that The Kerala Story is pure fiction, this is proof that it's pure fact!"
Fact
BOOM had debunked the same video in May, 2023 when it went viral with a similar false claim. We ran a reverse image search with screengrabs from the video and found a report by the media wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces carrying visuals from the same footage. The report stated that the Women's Protection Unit (YPJ or Yekîneyên Parastina Jin), an all-female militia unit of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), can be seen rescuing women from the Al-Hol refugee camp, previously controlled by ISIS, in the video. The report also carried a longer version of the video. Neither the report nor the extended version of the video mentioned that the women who were rescued were Indians. We later came across a thread on X by the Information and Documentation Department of the YPJ, featuring the viral video and additional information about the rescue mission. The thread stated that the rescued women were Yezidi, a Kurdish minority group. No mention of women of South Asian descent was found in the thread.