Does a viral photo document ISIS militants parading caged Yazidi women through Mosul, Iraq in 2016 before burning them to death? No, that's not true: The photo was taken in Alexandria, Egypt in 2013. It appeared in the Sharkia Today news site's coverage of Egyptian female protesters staging a symbolic demonstration unrelated to the burning deaths, which were reported to have been carried out in 2016. Their protest was related to the arrest of Egyptian women who had supported Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
The photo has been mislabeled before, in posts that don't disclose that it shows a protest performance. In this case, it was used in a September 27, 2025 X post (archived here) where it was published on the @realMaalouf account with text that read "Remember that 19 Yazidi girls were burned alive in iron cages by ISIS for refusing to convert to Islam and become sex slaves.". It continued:
ISIS paraded them through the streets of Mosul, then burned them in front of hundreds of people. Not a single Muslim or Palestinian activist protested for the Yazidis!
Here's what the latest post of the photo looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post by@realMaalouf.)
This fact check does not address whether ISIS burned Yazidi girls to death. It addresses the authenticity of the photo, which is real, but shows a performance as part of a street protest.
The photo matches the photo used in a Sharkia Today post (archived here) about a protest in Egypt against the arrests of women who had supported The Muslim Brotherhood:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of December 2013 Facebook post by SharkiaToday.)
At the time the photo was first posted to Facebook (December 16, 2013), the ISIS killings of captive Yazidi women had not yet been reported.
The first reports of the purported burnings did not surface until 2016, which is when the burnings were said to have happened.
Among the earliest reports still online and available for review were those in India Today, on June 6, 2016 (archived here).
By June 14, 2016, members of the British Parliament questioned Baroness Anelay of St Johns, the UK's Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office about (archived here) "last week's primeval burnings."
The same photo was fact-checked September 1, 2025 by FactCrescendo, a fact checking newsroom based in India.
