Baseless posts about India embassy attack misuse old photos
"Shocking news from Kabul: Attack on the Indian Embassy; several officials martyred while serving the nation," reads a Hindi-language X post shared July 7, 2025.
"This shameful act violates international diplomatic principles," adds the caption to two pictures that each depict a damaged building.
Similar claims also surfaced on Facebook on the anniversary of the 2008 attack on India's embassy in Afghanistan that killed 41 people and injured about 150 others (archived here and here).
Comments to the false posts indicate social media users believed the visuals were recent.
"This is bad news," one wrote. Another said, "Will Modi do something or not?" referring to India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But there have been no official reports of an assault targeting the Indian diplomatic headquarters in Kabul.
A combination of reverse image and keyword searches on Google found the first photo on the archives of The Associated Press (AP) news agency (archived link)
"Afghan security forces watch a house burn at the site of a clash between insurgents and security forces at the Indian Consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, Friday, May 23, 2014," reads part of its caption.
The picture was also published in a report from Indian media NDTV about the incident (archived link).
The second same image was published in a Reuters report with a caption that says, "Afghan officials inspect outside the German embassy after a blast in Kabul, Afghanistan May 31, 2017" (archived link).
The report said a bomb hidden in a sewage tanker exploded in the centre of Kabul, killing at least 80 people and damaging embassy buildings.Al Jazeera featured the image in a report about the blast (archived link).
Other false posts include a third picture also from AP depicting former Indian diplomats inspecting the embassy in Kabul following a car bomb attack in October 2009 (archived here and here)
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"I watch a lot when I'm in town and I've seen some unbelievable shows." This isn't Kumar's first time in Canada this year. The British comedian was doing a show in Toronto in February, just as U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs came into effect. ADVERTISEMENT "That was a particularly febrile time," Kumar recalled. "I think I was hoping that things might have calmed down a little bit, but obviously they were never going to calm down." "It's a fascinating experiment in what happens when a country, for seemingly no reason, out of nowhere, reverses centuries of diplomatic relations with its neighbour, with whom it shares a land border." Kumar's February show was also just months before Canada's last election, which saw Mark Carney get elected prime minister after previous holding the position of Governor of the Bank of England. "It obviously is very strange for a British person that Mark Carney is [the Prime Minister]. 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I don't think the people that I'm performing to are interested in hearing like, he says 'bigly,' or look at him, isn't he orange. I think if I went out and did that kind of stuff the people that I'm performing to would be furious. I'm always trying to thread that balance between jokes that are funny, but also engage with the seriousness of the stuff that a figure like Trump is capable of." What that has also meant is that Kumar has to be especially adaptable to respond to what's happening in the world, U.S. politics, Trump and beyond, which he's been able to navigate with real finesse. "Since 2016, I've always kept a bit of room in my shows for stuff to change constantly," Kumar said. "You try and make sure that ... 80 per cent of the show is set in stone, ... and then the other 20 per cent you have to be loose and you have to keep writing while you're touring." "The silver lining of that is that you're never bored with the show. 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ADVERTISEMENT "There's this illusion that's been created that we've got a lot of critical thinking applied to what we would call legacy media, or mainstream media," Kumar said. "And that's good and healthy. And we should have been considering who the gatekeepers were the whole time. ... However, there is a flip side to it, which is we have lost the ability to realize that there are gatekeepers to the internet, and you'll see people say, 'Well, you've got to question everything' and then repost something about, for example, the COVID vaccine that they've engaged absolutely no critical thought to at all." "There's this idea that social media platforms are purely democratic and if something is blowing up on social media it's just a pure exercise of democracy. And again, that doesn't really take into account the algorithms that govern these websites, and the fact that it's not necessarily qualitative, it's just that you've done something that games the algorithm in a particular way." From his evaluation of politics, societal structures and beyond, Kumar continues to be one of the best and essential voices in stand-up comedy. Nish Kumar has shows on July 23 and July 25 at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal
