A new fact check has found that viral videos and photos presented as proof of a tense law-and-order situation in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa after the imposition of governor’s rule are false. The visuals are old and unrelated clips, some filmed in other countries, recycled to feed a misleading narrative online.
The verification was carried out by iVerify Pakistan, a fact-checking project of IBA Karachi’s Centre for Excellence in Journalism and the UNDP. Its verdict: false.
What the viral posts claimed
Since October 11, when the federal government imposed emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, several social media accounts, most of them aligned with the PTI, have shared dramatic clips purporting to show unrest in the province. Some claimed people had “stood up to the army” in Peshawar. Others suggested students were marching on the Governor’s House. One clip showed security personnel running amid gunfire, with captions saying the situation was “out of control”. The posts spread fast: one crossed two million views on Instagram, while others drew hundreds of thousands of views on X.
Five viral clips, five false claims
iVerify Pakistan traced each visual with reverse-image searches. None of them is from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in October 2026.
The “Peshawar uprising” clip: actually filmed on July 9, 2026. It shows a confrontation between Frontier Corps personnel and the public at Quetta Civil Hospital, linked to protests in Balochistan after 35 policemen were kidnapped and 21 bodies were found in the Mangal Ziarat area. The original posts were also carried by the Afghan outlet Angeza Radio.
The “protest in Peshawar” clip: actually filmed on August 26, 2026, in Thai Nguyen, Vietnam. It shows football fans celebrating Vietnam’s victory over Thailand near Vo Nguyen Giap Square, as reported by TikTok and Facebook originals and the outlet Vietnam.Vn.
The gunfire clip: actually filmed on October 8 and 9, 2026, in Hasakah, Syria. It shows unrest after Kurdish signs and symbols were destroyed around a Syrian flag-raising ceremony in Al-Salam Square, where security forces fired into the air and civilians were reported injured. The footage was carried by Kurd Press of Iran and Kurdistan 24 of Iraq.
The vehicle-pelting clip: two years old. It shows clashes in Islamabad during the PTI’s October 2024 march toward D-Chowk, led at the time by then K-P chief minister Ali Amin Gandapur, demanding the release of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. The same footage had already been misattributed twice before, to Gilgit in June 2026 and to Islamabad in February 2026.
The “students marching on Governor’s House” clip: actually from October 2025. It shows teachers and students of government colleges protesting across K-P against the outsourcing of low-enrolment colleges and proposed new promotion requirements for teachers. The Indian outlet The Free Press Journal carried the footage on October 5, 2025, and Dawn also covered the protest.
Why the province is in the spotlight
The misinformation wave follows a real and serious political development. On October 11, the federal government imposed emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa under Articles 232 and 234 of the Constitution, after the president approved recommendations from an emergency federal cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
The Prime Minister’s Office said the step was taken because of what it called the provincial government’s “deliberate disengagement from the fight against terrorism”. The move has deepened the standoff between the federation and the province: K-P Information Minister Shafi Jan, who had been with the now-dysfunctional K-P chief minister Sohail Afridi on the PTI’s long march, claimed Afridi was taken into custody, while the PTI condemned the emergency as “political victimisation”. Communications and internet services in the province were also disrupted.
It is against this charged backdrop: a suspended chief minister, a provincial leader whose brother has now moved the Peshawar High Court seeking his recovery, and a federal government claiming credible evidence of PTI contacts with the TTP — that old footage is being passed off as fresh unrest.
A familiar pattern
K-P has been at the centre of a misinformation storm all week. A separate fake post, falsely attributed to former lieutenant general Nigar Johar and claiming she had announced a probe into the province’s Sehat Card, was also debunked and rejected by the K-P government, as Feature Pakistan reported.
K-P’s legal community has also pushed back, with lawyers across the province observing a black day and boycotting court proceedings over the emergency. The lesson for readers: when a province is in political crisis, unrelated dramatic footage travels faster than the facts. Reverse-image searches by independent fact-checkers remain the quickest way to check whether a shocking clip is what it claims to be. In this case, the answer for all five visuals was the same: they are not.
