Three hostages kneel in front of a camera, their hands tied behind their backs and their heads covered with black plastic bags that obscure their faces. Looming behind them is a group of bearded, glowering militants, dressed in tunics and turbans, some holding assault rifles.
“We have one message for America,” the man standing in the middle says, with one hand resting on the shoulder of the kneeling figure in front of him, the other hand jabbing the air to emphasize his speech. To people of a certain age, this scene is immediately recognizable. The intense stares, the polemical script, the stillness of the kneeling bodies—it was all eerily reminiscent of the videos of Daniel Pearl and James Foley being beheaded by Islamic figures.
Thankfully, this video took a different turn. The speaker removes the bag from the face of the man kneeling before him, who then proceeds to flash a Hollywood smile and give an emphatic thumbs-up. “Welcome to Afghanistan!” he says straight into the camera, after which a montage of Westerners posing for pictures in mountain glens and doing pullups on the barrels of tank guns starts to play.
Yosaf Aryubi, an Afghan American in his late twenties, made the video as an advertisement for his travel agency, Raza Afghanistan, which organizes tours of the country. Aryubi, who splits his time between Afghanistan and California, plays the role of would-be executor, while Jake Youngblood Dobbs, an American travel influencer who was on a tour with Raza at the time, is the ersatz victim whom Aryubi unveils. The video is simultaneously a provocative advertisement for Aryubi’s company—as well as an encouragement for tourists to visit Afghanistan. The pro-Taliban social-media account @afghanarabc shared the post, indicating at least a bit of an official imprimatur for Aryubi’s stunt. (The account has also shared other English-language videos, including a clip from Tucker Carlson’s show, in which he positively contrasts Afghanistan’s punitive drug-treatment programs to those in America.)
I hate to admit it, but when I first saw this video a couple of months ago, it made me laugh. The tonal whiplash gave it a nonsensical, dark irony, like something an especially cynical Tim Robinson would create. Youngblood and others even have an affectionate nickname for their hosts: Talibros. The dudes-rock montage that followed the execution sketch had some genuinely funny bits. Some guys are fooling around with an assault rifle that has “Property of U.S. Govt” etched on its side. “It’s an American souvenir,” someone jokes. “Oh, it’s not even on safety right now,” the white tourist holding the gun says before the entire group bursts out in the familiar laughter of a group of guys who are doing something stupid and dangerous and, therefore, hilarious.
Still, the opening scene stuck with me, and, in the weeks that followed, I began to interpret it as something less funny and more sinister. Filmed beheadings were indelible images of the wars of my childhood and adolescence in the two-thousands, graphic pieces of contraband we sought out on bootleg websites. I felt queasy thinking back to those videos, a vivid response that I suspect was the goal of this crop of young influencers. Aryubi’s irreverent references to years of violence in Afghanistan are part of a growing library of irony-soaked travel content that simultaneously asks viewers to stop believing everything the mainstream media tells them about the country while also instructing them not to take what the influencers say too seriously. Call it Frommer’s for edgelords. Several other content creators have spent time travelling through Afghanistan, glowingly sharing stories about how men can still be men, given the Taliban’s preservation of traditional values. A few poke fun at Western assumptions of how women are treated in the country. The wildly popular American YouTuber Addison Pierre Maalouf—better known as Arab to his nearly two million subscribers—toured Afghanistan last winter. In one video, he and his companions vis