Algeria football celebration videos falsely linked to Middle East war
- Published on March 5, 2026 at 20:19
- 3 min read
- By Marisha GOLDHAMER, AFP USA
Iran has fired retaliatory missiles and drones at Israel after US-Israeli air strikes killed its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but videos of flares plummeting from a blood-red sky are unrelated to the war. The footage, which has been repeatedly misrepresented, was filmed in Algeria as fireworks were set off during a 2024 celebration of football fans.
"Israel is facing an unprecedented barrage of ballistic missiles, with reports of impacts and fires in major population centers," says a March 2, 2026 post on Instagram.
The post shares a compilation of three videos showing a night sky illuminated by red flares.
The clips, which the same account also published to TikTok, racked up tens of thousands of views across Instagram, X and Facebook and were spread in multiple languages.
The United States and Israel triggered the war with Iran on February 28 with strikes that killed its most powerful figure, Khamenei, who had dominated the country since 1989. Retaliatory strikes by Tehran have targeted Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa among other Israeli cities, with Hezbollah also attacking from Lebanon.
But out-of-context footage and AI-generated disinformation have flooded social media since the war began -- and the compilation of clips depicting flares in the sky is similarly misrepresented.
Football celebration
Reverse image searches revealed that the first three seconds of the compilation is a flipped version of footage that has been on YouTube since August 9, 2024 (archived here).
Both videos feature a man in a green shirt filming with his phone, a white van and tall clock in the middle of the street.
The English part of the caption of the older video says: "Mouloudia fans' celebration of 103 years."
Algerian football team Mouloudia Club d'Alger celebrated its 103rd anniversary in August 2024. The team published a video showing a huge display of red fireworks in the capital Algiers to mark the event on its official Facebook page (archived here).
Keyword searches found similar footage in reports on the celebrations of the Algerian club's anniversary (archived here and here).
AFP first verified the origin of the visual in October 2024, when it was misrepresented amid clashes between Israel and Hezbollah.
Further reverse image searches traced the next part of the compilation -- footage captured from inside a car -- to an August 2024 TikTok video shared with hashtags related to the Algerian football club, such as "MouloudiaAlger" (archived here).
The images were again flipped, but a blue car with a yellow license plate is clearly seen in both.
The third sequence of the red sky was uploaded on August 24, 2024 to YouTube (archived link). The caption reads: "The 103rd anniversary of Mouloudia Club d'Alger (MCA) was marked by a breathtaking pyroshow in Algeria."
The footage corresponds with Google Street View imagery from a road near the Algiers ferry terminal (archived here).
The latter two clips were previously misrepresented in October 2024 as Iran and Israel exchanged fire.
Read more of AFP's fact-checks about the war in the Middle East here.
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