Images depicting capture of American solders in Iran are AI-generated
- Published on March 6, 2026 at 21:19
- 2 min read
- By AFP Middle East & North Africa
- Translation and adaptation Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
Despite US President Donald Trump dismissing the idea of sending ground troops to Iran amid the expanding war in the Middle East, images purporting to show American soldiers captured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have spread across social media. However, the supposed pictures were generated by artificial intelligence, as is evidenced by visual inconsistencies and the watermark for Google's Gemini AI tool in each frame.
"Breaking: U.S. Delta Force troops are in the custody of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard," says a March 5, 2026 post sharing the images on X.
Similar posts spread across X and other platforms such as Facebook, circulating in English as well as Arabic, Spanish, French and other languages. Some posts claimed the soldiers depicted were the same special forces whom Trump sent in January to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from Caracas.
The images emerged as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said March 5 that a potential US or Israeli ground invasion "would be a big disaster for them" -- a remark Trump told NBC News was a "wasted comment." The US president said putting troops on the ground in Iran would be a "waste of time" in an interview with the broadcaster March 5.
The war erupted February 28 after US-Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, triggering a wave of retaliatory attacks across the region.
Six US troops were killed by a drone attack in Kuwait as the war broke out, the Pentagon said. But the images purporting to show several more captured by Iranian forces are fake.
Each of the images AFP examined contains the signature sparkle-shaped watermark for Gemini, Google's AI tool, in the lower-right corner.
Reverse image searches in Google also returned results saying the visuals were "made with Google AI," and Gemini detected SynthIDs -- invisible watermarks that Google says are meant to identify content generated or edited using its AI tools -- attached to all three of them.
AFP also identified irregularities in the images that are typical of AI-generated fakes, 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.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the Middle East war here.
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