Footage from 2003 Baghdad bombing goes viral with claim it shows Israel in 2025
Viral TikTok video was posted with claim it showed a heavy bombardment of Israel on June 17
CLAIM
Viral footage on TikTok was posted with a claim it showed a heavy bombardment of Israel on June 17 amid the escalating conflict with Iran.
BACKGROUND
The simmering conflict between Israel and Iran broke into an all-out war in recent days, with both sides trading missiles after a night of deadly Israeli attacks on Tehran in the early hours of Friday morning, June 13.
Iran reported that at least 224 people were killed throughout that weekend. Israel reported 24 deaths in the same period.
A lot of real material was circulating online illustrating the attacks, but some videos and images immediately raised suspicion, as we reported in the latest Fact-Check Dispatch.
One video on TikTok posted early on June 17 purported to show the situation in Israel as it came under Iranian fire. The video was posted with onscreen text reading: “Iran Has Launched The Largest Attack On Israel In History. Today 17/06/25. Iran New Wave Of Missile Hitting Israel.”
The video was posted by an account called @lahoreheraldnews. Its profile picture matches the logo used by the Lahore Herald, a Pakistan-based news outlet. It was not possible to verify the TikTok account as being associated with the news outlet because the website’s social links were not functioning.
The video showed a city under heavy bombardment, and people could be heard in the background screaming and sobbing. The uploader did not give a location in Israel for the footage, but did include the hashtag #telaviv.
The clip had racked up over 1.7 million views at the time of writing, in only its first day online.
METHOD
A reverse image search on Google Lens on different stills from the video brought up lots of examples of it being shared in recent days.
However, it also pulled up a near-match from a CNN link titled: “Iconic moments from 2003 Iraq War”. The video thumbnail looked very similar, but unfortunately the website’s video player was not working at the time of writing.
Nevertheless, it gave us a starting point to search for other news footage from that time, and gave some context as to why some of the comments beneath the TikTok video were claiming that it showed Iraq in 2003.
After this, we carried out manual searches online to find archive material from the Iraq War. It led us to this — a video on the ITN Archive YouTube page titled: “Iraq War: Shock and Awe Assault on Baghdad Begins (2003)”.
The video shows a news report from March 21, 2003, when ITV News journalist John Irvine reported from Baghdad as the ‘shock and awe’ phase of the US-led air campaign got underway.
A close inspection of the footage shows several similarities with the scene shown in the TikTok video: footage filmed across a river, very heavy bombardment on the opposite bank, and lights illuminating the waterfront.
There are moments during the TikTok video that show a zoomed in look at some distinctive buildings. We were able to match these to videos shown in the archive news footage as fire and smoke rained down on Baghdad.
In another frame, what appears to be a large palace is targeted. This also matches a scene in the archive footage from 2003, right down to the angle and illumination of the river-facing facade of the building.
This clip is not an exact match; the creator of the TikTok may have taken it from another news source, as it would not be unusual for news cameras to be camped quite close to each other at a safe location while out on location.
Another unusual aspect of the TikTok video is how it appears to feature the sounds of shocked eyewitnesses, even though we now know it was professionally filmed by a news crew in a war zone.
The speech is difficult to make out, but it is not recognisably Arabic. An auto-transcription tool chose Portuguese to transcribe the speech. A Portuguese speaker we asked agreed that the audio could be a regional dialect, but we could not confirm the language. The audio, listed on TikTok as ‘original sound’ by the same uploader, has since been used by other TikTok users for several AI-generated disaster videos.
This analysis shows the footage was filmed during the so-called ‘shock and awe’ phase of the Iraq War, specifically the U.S. bombardment of Baghdad throughout the day on March 21, 2003.
RATING
The footage shows events that took place in Baghdad on March 21, 2003, during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The added audio is unrelated.
SOURCES
Tiktok.com. (2025). [online] Available at: Iran has launched the largest attack on Israel in history now today 17/06/2025 [Accessed 17 Jun. 2025].
Lahore Herald. (2024). Home. [online] Available at: https://lahoreherald.com/ [Accessed 17 Jun. 2025].
CNN. (2013). Iconic moments from 2003 Iraq War. [online] [Accessed 17 Jun. 2025].
Youtube.com. (2025). Available at: Iraq War: Shock and Awe Assault on Baghdad Begins (2003) [Accessed 17 Jun. 2025].