Fact Check: Are the images showing American soldiers detained in Iran real?
WASHINGTON, DC: Amid the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East following the death of Iran’s supreme leader in a joint operation by the US and Israel, some images have been circulating on social media platforms showing American soldiers captured in Iran, sparking concerns. Let us analyze the viral photos and fact-check the claim.
Claim: American soldiers captured by Iranian troops
The viral image purportedly shows American soldiers captured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
One of the posts that shared the images on March 3 on X wrote, “Breaking: U.S. Delta Force troops are in the custody of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard."
Similar posts have spread on other platforms such as Facebook and Threads, which are being circulated in English as well as Arabic, Spanish, French, and other languages.
Some posts even claimed that the soldiers depicted were the same special forces whom Trump sent in January to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from Caracas.
Fact Check: Fake, the images are AI-generated
However, the claim is false, and the images are AI-generated, which contain the signature sparkle-shaped watermark for Gemini, Google's AI tool, in the lower-right corner.
The images also include visual inconsistencies, including malformed fingers, blurred faces, and inconsistent camouflage patterns and patches on the troops' uniforms. A figure in the background of one image appears to have three arms.
President Donald Trump also dismissed sending ground troops to Iran amid the expanding war in the Middle East.
Reverse image searches in Google also yielded results confirming the visuals to be made with Google Gemini, which detected SynthIDs, which are invisible watermarks that Google says are meant to identify content generated or edited using its AI tools, attached to all three of them.
Donald Trump says war deaths are inevitable
The images surfaced as Trump quite casually said that during the time of war, people die, as he also claimed that currently, Americans should be concerned about Iran attacking the US.
The US commander-in-chief remarked during an interview with TIME for their latest cover story, 'Trump’s War', published on Thursday, March 5. Correspondent Eric Cortellessa asked Trump about the US and Israel joint attack on Iran, and if the people of the US should worry about being targeted at home. He replied, “I guess.”
The Republican leader’s statement came after six service members died in an Iranian airstrike in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, on March 1.
