What was claimed
A video shows US special forces landing in Caracas, Venezuela.
Our verdict
False. This video is actually from June 2025 and shows a US military exercise in North Carolina.
Old video of US military exercise shared with claims it shows soldiers landing in Venezuela
An old video of a US military exercise in North Carolina has been shared online with claims it shows the recent strikes on Venezuela.
The video, which shows soldiers abseiling from a helicopter onto a large building, was filmed in June 2025, more than six months before the United States launched military strikes on the country’s capital, Caracas.
The clip, which has been shared thousands of times across Facebook and X, is captioned “US special forces (Delta Force) have just landed in Caracus [sic], #Venezuela”.
While it is true that the US seized the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro along with his wife Cilia Flores in an overnight raid on 3 January, this is not what the video footage shows.
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Full Fact traced the clip back to a post on X by Margo Martin, special assistant to the American President Donald Trump, published 10 June 2025.
President Trump made a speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that day. Other images posted by Ms Martin on the 10th include captions which say he watched “Special Forces Operations demonstrations.”
The US military’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) also published similar footage, captioned “Trump observes a capabilities demonstration by U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina”.
During unfolding global events, misinformation and misleading content can spread quickly online. Before sharing videos such as these, first consider whether they come from a verifiable and trustworthy source. Our guides to spotting misleading images and videos, and toolkit on how to identify bad information, can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this is an old video filmed in North Carolina in June 2025.