Social media users share AI-generated video falsely depicting Iran supreme leader’s funeral

Massive crowds gathered in Tehran in early July to mourn Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli air strikes that sparked a regional war in late February. However, a clip circulating online that purports to show the ceremony is fabricated — the footage does not match authentic visuals of the Iranian capital, and detection software indicates it was  generated using AI.

“Approximately 40 million people participated in the funeral ceremony of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, in Tehran — not including various cities across the country,” reads an X post published July 5, 2026.

The post shares a 33-second video showing aerial footage of people gathering at a large religious complex. The crowd, dressed in black, fills the streets around the site while carrying Arabic-language signs and Iranian flags.

Other posts sharing the same video circulated with similar claims in  Thai, English, Sindhi and Arabic, with one clip accumulating more than 20,000 views.

The footage spread as crowds amassed in Tehran for s ix days of public funeral ceremonies for Khamenei starting from July 4, including a dedicated day in neighbouring Iraq ( archived link).

Mourners thronged the Grand Mosalla religious complex in the Iranian capital, where his body lay in state alongside the coffins of four other family members also killed in US-Israeli strikes on February 28.

This video shared online, however, contains multiple visual inconsistencies and elements that do not match authentic photos of the Grand Mosalla.

AI-generated video

The clip itself depicts the same structure in different ways across several cuts.

In one shot, only two minarets are visible in the complex — but seconds later, the structure features a green-roofed building and four additional minarets.

Google Maps satellite imagery shows the Grand Mosalla with features that do not match the structure depicted in the circulating video ( archived link).

AFP also captured and  distributed photos of  mourners at the  Grand Mosalla on July 5 that look different from the footage circulating online.

An analysis of the video using  Hive Moderation, an AI detection tool, found it was 99.7 percent likely to have been generated by AI ( archived link).

AFP has previously  debunked other AI-generated content linked to Iran and the Middle East war.