What was claimed
A video of a burning skyscraper shows the “CIA headquarters in Dubai” on fire following a recent attack by Iran.
Our verdict
False. The footage shows an October 2015 fire at an apartment building in Sharjah, a neighboring city to Dubai in the UAE.
A video of smoke billowing from a high-rise building has been circulating with false claims that it shows the “CIA headquarters” in Dubai following an Iranian strike.
The clip, which has been shared thousands of times on X, Facebook and Instagram, shows smoke billowing from the blackened side of a multi-storey building.
Captions posted with the footage and screenshots of it include “the CIA headquarters in Dubai is on fire”, and a “skyscraper in Dubai is on fire after an attack by Iran. Iran claims that the CIA headquarters is located there.”
But these claims are misleading. The clip is old and unrelated to the recent strikes by Iran.
It actually shows a fire at an apartment building in Sharjah, a neighbouring city north of Dubai, which occurred in October 2015.
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The same video was posted on YouTube in October 2015 with a title (translated from Arabic) saying: “A large fire in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.”
And many similar videos from different angles filmed in 2015 show the same building, with a distinctive blue strip down one side, alight.
We also matched the building to a location in Sharjah. Google Street View images show that the cladding on the lower half of the building changed after 2015 to a lighter colour which does not match that shown in the video being shared.
While there have been reports of Iran hitting a warehouse in the industrial area of Sharjah, this video is unrelated.
Iran has also struck several targets in the UAE, including data centres, hotels and airports, with government officials saying hundreds of missiles and drones have been fired at the country. However, we haven’t been able to verify the claim that a CIA base in Dubai was hit.
Since the outbreak of the current widespread conflict in the Middle East we have debunked a number of misleading and miscaptioned videos and images, including some generated by AI, spreading on social media.
It’s important to consider whether content you see online comes from a reliable and verifiable source before sharing. Our Full Fact guides 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 the video is of a fire in 2015 in the UAE, not damage caused from a strike by Iran.
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