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Recycled Video

Does a viral video document U.S. Army soldiers deploying to Iran on June 22, 2025? No, that's not true: The post provides no evidence where those soldiers are going, nor when. No Army deployments have been documented by evidence-based news sites and neither the White House nor Congress have announced U.S. troops will be sent to Iran.

The video was posted on several pages. It remained active in a June 22, 2025 X.com post (archived here) on the @HustleBitch_ page, with the caption "🚨 U.S. SOLDIER POSTS VIDEO - "DEPLOYMENT TO IRAN"". It continued:

A U.S. Army soldier just filmed inside a military aircraft filled with troops, and tagged it #deployment and #war. He says they're heading to Iran.

This is what the post on X looked like at the time this fact check was written:

(Source: X.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)

The TikTok account of @johneybee2 appears to belong to a member of the U.S. Army named John Burns, seen on his since-made-private account asking TikTok users to follow and like his videos in return for him doing the same on their accounts. TikTok user @fumptruck2 posted his video as part of her own, (archived here) saying it appears to be an out of date video from a non-related and earlier deployment that he kept posting and taking down in an effort to build audience. On June 23, 2025, the @johneybee2 video was not available for public viewing.

The term, "soldier" refers specifically to members of the Army.

The White House posted a summary of Trump Administration public statements (archived here) about the July 22 bombing raid on Iran's nuclear program with no mention of the Army being deployed and heavy emphasis on statements that the U.S. is not going to war with Iran, just with its nuclear program, as in this example of quotes from Vice President J.D. Vance's television talk show appearances:

(Source: Whitehouse.gov screenshot with red highlights added by Lead Stories.)

Using the search phrase U.S. AND deploy AND Iran, in Google News for the seven days leading up to June 24, Lead Stories found in its index of thousands of news sites no reports of Army or ground troops being deployed to the region, nor any reports of members of Congress supporting or opposing deployment of ground troops to Iran.

Although not definitive, a reverse image search using a key frame from the video found that image indexed to a June 17 item posted on TikTok. If that indicates the video has been online since June 17, 2025, it could not document soldiers being deployed to Iran on June 22.

Here is the key-frame Lead Stories used, found at 00:05 into the video:

(Source: X.com screenshot.)

The Google image search tool, set to exact matches of that image, found this example, dated June 17, 2025. It should be noted that although the TikTok "Team Trump - original sound" page features a set of videos all using the same soundbyte of President Trump, that soundbyte does not appear in the viral deployment video.

Also, the image of soldiers seated on a plane does not appear in any of the videos on the "original sound" page, which suggests the example could only have been found by visual, as opposed to audio, matching:

:

(Source: Google.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)

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