Old Footage of US Soldiers Killed in Syria Circulated as Recent Iran-Israel Conflict Video
On February 28, the United States and Israel carried out attacks in various places in Iran, including the capital Tehran. In response to this incident, Iran launched retaliatory missile attacks on US bases in the Middle East. On the morning of March 1, six US soldiers were killed in a direct Iranian missile or drone attack on a temporary US military operations center located at a civilian port in Kuwait. In this context, since March 02, a video has been circulated on various platforms on the internet with the claim that ‘the bodies of two dead US service members have arrived in the US to be buried’.
See posts circulated on Facebook with this claim here (Archive), here (Archive), and here (Archive).
See the post circulated on Instagram with this claim here (Archive).
Fact Check
The Rumor Scanner team’s investigation reveals that the discussed video is not of an incident related to the ongoing Iran-Israel conflict. In reality, a scene of the handover of the bodies of two Iowa National Guard members killed in Syria in December 2025 has been circulated claiming to be an incident during the recent Iran-Israel conflict.
Investigating this matter, a video published on December 18, 2025, titled ‘Trump Attends Dignified Transfer of lowa National Guard Members Killed in Syria‘ was found on the YouTube channel of The Financial Express. The scenes in that video bear resemblance to the video circulated with the discussed claim.
From the detailed description of the said video, it is known that this is a scene showing US President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, and other top military officials attending the dignified transfer operation of the bodies of two Iowa National Guard members killed in Syria. There, respects were paid to the service and sacrifice of the fallen soldiers, and their remains were handed over to their grieving families.
The same information is also confirmed in reports published by other media outlets (1, 2). These reports mention that Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar (25) and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard (29) were returned to US soil on December 17, 2025, via a transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. These two individuals were killed in an ambush by an ISIS gunman. Their interpreter, US civilian Ayad Mansoor Sakat, was also killed, and his coffin was taken home that day.
It is worth noting that the remains of the six service members killed in the ongoing Iran-Israel conflict were transferred on March 07. This operation was held at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, USA, in the presence of Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Therefore, old video footage from December 2025 has been circulated as scenes of US soldiers killed in the recent Iran-Israel conflict, which is misleading.