Social media is abuzz with a video (here, here, and here) of a huge blast that purportedly occurred in Pakistan at its army headquarters, which killed 20 Pakistani soldiers. In the viral video, we can see people running helter-skelter on the roads as a fire cloud spreads upwards where the blast has occurred. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of a massive explosion that occurred at the Pakistani Army headquarters.
Fact: This video shows a fuel tank explosion that happened in Douma, near Damascus, Syria. It has nothing to do with Pakistan. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search to understand if such a blast had recently occurred at the army headquarters of Pakistan. This search did not yield any credible news reports supporting this claim. However, we found news reports (here, here, and here) about an IED blast that happened in Quetta, Pakistan, on 27 March 2025.
Reportedly, three people died, and several were critically injured in this incident. Firstpost reported on 27 March 2025 that multiple such attacks had happened in Balochistan, which killed eight people. The visuals of these incidents did not match the viral video.
Further, to learn more about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few of its keyframes. This search led us to several news reports (here, here (archive link), and here) on this video. According to these reports, this video shows a fuel tanker explosion in Douma, in the countryside near Damascus in Syria. These reports were published by media outlets like Al Jazeera-Syria, TRT Arabic, and Syria TV.
Al Jazeera-Syria posted this video on their official Facebook page on 18 March 2025 with a caption translated from Arabic that says, ‘A fuel tank exploded near the Misraba Bridge in the city of #Douma in the Damascus countryside.’ All of this evidence makes it clear that this video has nothing to do with Pakistan.
To sum up, a video from Syria is falsely shared as visuals of a massive explosion at Pakistan’s army headquarters.
