Footage from 2022 military exercise misrepresented amid Middle East war
- Published on March 9, 2026 at 17:46
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
A video is spreading across platforms with claims it shows an Iranian strike pummeling a US naval ship as it was refueling in the Indian Ocean. But the clip is misrepresented; it shows the sinking of a decommissioned US vessel near the state of Hawaii as part of a 2022 maritime warfare exercise involving the United States, Australia, Canada and Malaysia.
"JUST IN: IRGC targeted a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Indian Ocean while it was refueling and preparing for operations," says a March 4, 2026 post on X.
The post comes from "@SilentlySirs," an account AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for spreading disinformation. The clip shows an aerial view of a blast hitting a boat at sea, triggering a fiery explosion and a giant plume of smoke.
Similar posts spread in multiple languages across X and other platforms, such as Facebook, as the Middle East war triggered by US-Israeli strikes that killed Iran's supreme leader embroiled nations beyond the region and brought chaos to usually peaceful areas around the Gulf.
A top US military officer said March 5 that its forces have sunk more than 30 Iranian ships during the war, including a vessel off the coast of Sri Lanka that was torpedoed in an attack that killed at least 87 people. Sri Lanka and India are providing sanctuary to hundreds of sailors from three Iranian naval vessels targeted or threatened by the United States as of March 9, a diplomatic conundrum as the war spills into the Indian Ocean.
The Pentagon previously denied Iran's claim that its missiles struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier and one of more than a dozen warships the United States has in the region.
The video claimed online to show an Iranian strike on a US ship in the Indian Ocean, meanwhile, is misrepresented.
Reverse image searches uncovered the same footage featured in a July 16, 2022 YouTube video from Malaysian news outlet Harian Metro (archived here). The video's title and description says it shows the KD Lekir, a Royal Malaysian Navy ship, launching a missile on a target in the waters of Hawaii as part of a training exercise at the Rim of the Pacific, known as RIMPAC.
RIMPAC is an international maritime exercise involving nearly 30 partner nations, according to the Pentagon.
Further keyword searches of the US military's Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) website found the original footage posted July 15, 2022 (archived here). The caption says it shows forces from the United States, Australia, Canada and Malaysia firing upon and sinking a decommissioned ship as part of a July 12, 2022 exercise.
The DVIDS site hosts several other videos of the same exercise, with descriptions indicating that the targeted ship, the ex-USS Rodney M. Davis, was cleaned ahead of the sinking to remove all environmentally harmful material (archived here, here and here).
A press release from the US Navy said the sinking took place in waters north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai (archived here). According to a report published in the Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, the exercise marked the first time a Malaysian naval ship had fired a missile outside Malaysian waters.
Old footage has been repeatedly misrepresented online by accounts engaged in what analysts call a "narrative war."
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation about the Middle East war here.
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