Last updated on May 9th, 2026
Editor's Note
Since the 2026 conflict began, social media has seen uncontextualized military clips recaptioned to falsely claim victories or attacks. Warship fires and missile strikes are often weaponized as fake evidence. Verifying these widely circulated clips is clearly in the public interest.
Claim
On April 12, 2026, X user ‘Iranian Force’ @MrImranPk shared a video showing a warship engulfed in flames, accompanied by the caption: “At the very moment when Trump was boasting that ‘Iran’s naval power has been completely destroyed,’ the Iranian Navy sank a U.S. ship that attempted to approach the port of Bandar Abbas.” The post garnered over 3.4 million views. The next day, on April 13, user @khanadan99 reposted the same video and received 941,000 views.
Fact Check
1. Source Tracing
One widely circulated version was posted on March 9, 2026, by the X user @sentdefender, which described the footage as showing “a vessel with the Iranian Naval Forces, believed to likely be a Shahid Soleimani-class missile corvette operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN), explode today off the coast of Bandar Lengeh in the Persian Gulf, following a strike by the United States.” This clip is visually identical to the one posted by user @MrImranPk.
Source tracing shows the opposite of what the viral post claims — it was in fact a U.S. strike on an Iranian vessel near Bandar Lengeh, not an Iranian attack on a U.S. ship near Bandar Abbas.
2. Vessel Identification
Frame-by-frame examination of the warship in the footage reveals characteristics consistent with an Iranian Soleimani-class catamaran corvette, not a U.S. Warship.
The identification process can be carried out in two steps. Which event the footage depicts was established by the source tracing detailed above in Section 1: the video posted by @MrImranPk is identical frame-by-frame to the @sentdefender clip of the March 9 U.S. strike. Determining what class of ship is visible in the footage can be established by assessing the key features and contextual background below.
1)Ship class identification (from visual features):
The vessel visible in user @MrImranPkvideo’s video shows a low, broad hull silhouette with a compact superstructure amidships, features consistent with the Shahid Soleimani-class catamaran corvette.
2)Key contextual fact:
The U.S. Navy does not operate any catamaran-hulled frigate or destroyer in the Persian Gulf region.
3)Addressing the smoke issue:
We note explicitly that heavy smoke obscures the waterline in the rumor frame, so the twin-hull split itself cannot be resolved directly from this viewing angle; the identification of the vessel rests on the visible silhouette features above, combined with the source-tracing result that links the footage to a strike already publicly attributed to a Soleimani-class vessel.
4) Supporting reference imagery:
These visible features are consistent with reference imagery of the Soleimani class — a side-view photograph of sister ship FS313-01 released by Iranian sources, and a top-down aerial image released by the U.S. Central Command of a separate March 4 strike on the same ship class, both of which show the catamaran twin-hull configuration.
3. Event Cross-Verification
1) U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) posted on March 4, 2026, that U.S. forces had hit a Soleimani-class warship, stating that its forces had “struck or sunk to the bottom of the ocean more than 20 ships from the Iranian regime.” The accompanying aerial image shows the characteristic twin-hull catamaran configuration.
4. Account Analysis
