Port Sudan blast falsely shared as Iranian attack on US military base in Djibouti
- Published on March 5, 2026 at 09:27
- 2 min read
- By Tolera FIKRU GEMTA, AFP Ethiopia
Joint US-Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader in February 2026, prompting retaliatory attacks by Tehran against US allies in the Gulf. Footage circulating in Ethiopia purports to show Iran bombing a US military base in Djibouti. However, this is false: the footage shows an explosion at Port Sudan in May 2025 and has been falsely linked to the ongoing Middle East war.
The TikTok post, shared on March 3, 2026, includes an Amharic text overlay reading: “Iran announced that it has attacked an American military base in Djibouti with four missiles.”
Additional text in the top-left corner of the clip reads: “Djibouti today.”
Djibouti is a small country strategically positioned in the Horn of Africa, with access to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
The post has been shared more than 1,700 times. It includes a 52-second video showing an explosion at a facility resembling a port.
Some comments believed the claim to be true.
“This is wonderful news,” reads one of the comments in Amharic. “I was really worried about that military camp before this happened,” another user added.
The post was also shared on Facebook here and here.
War broke out in the Middle East on February 28, 2026, when US and Israeli strikes targeted sites in Iran, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (archive here).
The strikes triggered retaliatory attacks from Iran, aimed at various US military and diplomatic locations in the region.
Djibouti hosts Camp Lemonnier, the only permanent US military base in Africa and a key operational hub for US Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (archived here).
On March 3, 2026, AFP reported Israel said it had struck a covert underground nuclear site in Iran, where scientists were allegedly developing a key component for nuclear weapons (archived here). Iran’s drone attacks also caused a fire near the US consulate in Dubai.
However, the footage shared on TikTok does not show Iran attacking the US military base in Djibouti.
Port Sudan explosion
AFP Fact Check used InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video and found that the original version was published by the Andalou Agency on May 6, 2025 (archived here).
According to the original description, the footage shows explosions and fires that occurred at the South Port in Port Sudan, the country's administrative centre.
“Loud explosions were heard in Port Sudan in the eastern part of the country, and fires erupted at the South Port. The fires are believed to have started following an attack on a fuel depot,” it reads.
According to an AFP report on the incident, military sources blamed the explosion on drone attacks by the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) (archived here).
The text “Djibouti today” was added to the TikTok clip, thereby misrepresenting the location and context. The footage, however, was unchanged.
AFP Fact Check geolocated the footage and confirmed that it was filmed at Port Sudan.
Distinctive features, including the blue gantry cranes visible in both the original footage and the TikTok clip, match the structures at Port Sudan.
Moreover, there are no credible reports that Iran attacked the US military base in Djibouti.
AFP Fact Check has debunked several claims related to the Middle East war (here, here and here).
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