Does a video show women in Iran removing burqas and then burning pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after he died in U.S.-Israeli strikes in February 2026? No, that's not true: The clip being shared does not show people in Iran after recent strikes. It instead shows a demonstration in Paris from January 2026, when a group of activists protested in solidarity with Iranian women and against Iran's regime.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Instagram on Feb. 28, 2026. It read:
Veils are dropping. Hijabs are burning.
For 36 brutal years, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran as Supreme Leader -- enforcing mandatory veiling, crushing dissent, sponsoring terror across the region, and turning 'Woman, Life, Freedom' into a death sentence for those who dared speak it. He presided over the 2022 murder of Mahsa Amini for a 'bad hijab,' the mass executions of protesters, the funding of proxies that targeted civilians from Gaza to Yemen, and a regime that held half its population in chains under the guise of Islamic law.
Today -- February 28, 2026 -- that era ends.
Khamenei, 86, has been killed in a precision joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike, confirmed by Iranian state media itself. His iron grip is broken. His office is rubble. The architect of oppression is gone.
Watch these women tear off the symbols of their subjugation -- not in fear, but in raw, triumphant joy.
This is what justice looks like when tyrants finally fall.
This is the real revolution the regime tried to bury.
The hijab was never just cloth. It was a flag of control.
Today, that flag is ashes.
Women of Iran: Your chains are shattering. Your voices are rising. The nightmare is over for the Iranian people!
This is what the post looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Image source: Post on Instagram.)
Conflict in the Middle East
The United States and Israel launched a military operation against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, targeting the nation's political and military leaders. Khamenei died the same day in an airstrike on his compound in Tehran, Iranian state media (archived here) reported.
Original video
Using a screenshot from the video, Lead Stories ran a reverse image search on Google Images (archived here). The search showed that the video of the protests first appeared online more than a month earlier, in January 2026. One example appeared in a post (archived here) on X on Jan. 18, 2026:
(Image source: Post on X.)
A story (archived here) on the protest appeared on Haberler, a Turkish news website, a day later on Jan. 19, 2026. This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: Post on Haberler.)
