Troop homecoming video misrepresented after US-Iran ceasefire
- Published on April 9, 2026 at 20:19
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
The United States and Iran reached a two-week ceasefire April 7, 2026 in the bombing that has enveloped much of the Middle East, with Tehran agreeing to temporarily reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz. But online claims that a video shows US troops returning home as a result of the pause in fighting are false; the clip captured the March homecoming of Iowa National Guard members who had been deployed to the Middle East for months in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, a mission against the Islamic State group.
"Another victory for Iran: American soldiers have started arriving home. After leaving the Middle East, American soldiers are saying, 'Why did we fight for Israel? If Iran is talking about peace, we will also stand with them,'" says an April 7, 2026 post on X.
Similar posts spread across X and other platforms, including Instagram, after Donald Trump said he agreed to suspend bombing of Iran for two weeks if Tehran reopened the Strait of Hormuz.
The US president told AFP in a brief call that the fragile ceasefire, agreed to barely an hour before his deadline to obliterate the Islamic republic was set to expire, was a "total and complete victory."
Thousands of US forces have been ordered to the region, with US officials refusing to rule out the deployment of ground troops. The two-week ceasefire aims to allow talks to end the conflict that has already killed thousands and plunged the global economy into turmoil.
But the video circulating online is unrelated to the strained ceasefire.
Reverse image searches revealed Newsradio 1040 WHO, an Iowa radio station, posted the same footage to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok on March 12 (archived here, here and here).
"Almost 600 Iowa soldiers returned home today following a 9 month deployment in the Middle East as a part of Operation Inherent Resolve," the radio station wrote in its caption.
Narrating the segment, reporter Claire Burnett says the soldiers came from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division and were deployed to Iraq and Syria for nine months. She says the footage was captured at the Iowa Air National Guard's 132d Wing base in Des Moines, the state's capital city.
Operation Inherent Resolve is a campaign launched in 2014 to help local partner forces "secure lasting defeat of ISIS," according to a US military website dedicated to the mission (archived here).
The Iowa National Guard troops who returned to the midwestern state on March 12 arrived at three different locations, with more than 140 soldiers landing at the 132d Wing, according to Facebook posts from the Iowa National Guard (archived here and here).
Photos posted to Flickr show the same moment captured at the start of the radio station's video, in which a soldier AFP identified as the unit's commander Colonel Eric Soults leads the group in deboarding the plane, descending the stairs and hugging Governor Kim Reynolds on the tarmac (archived here and here).
Reynolds shared some of the photos to her Facebook (archived here).
A March 12 segment from the Des Moines television station KCCI 8 News shows the same aircraft and troops (archived here).
The Pentagon's Defense Visual Information Distribution Service's (DVIDS) website includes a May 2025 photo of Soults and the unit "preparing for a training rotation" ahead of "a yearlong overseas deployment," according to its caption (archived here).
Another DVIDS photo dated to August 2025 shows the troops "providing base security in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility in support of Operation Inherent Resolve" (archived here).
A blog post covering a March 2025 town hall hosted ahead of the deployment quoted Soults as saying the troops would be maintaining security in the region and were not being sent as part of a contingency mission (archived here and here).
AFP reached out to the National Guard Bureau and Soults for comment, but no responses were forthcoming.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about Iran here.
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