```
>>> import lxml
>>> import lxml.etree
>>> xmlp = lxml.etree.XMLParser(recover=True)
>>> xmltext = '    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root></root>'
>>> lxml.etree.fromstring(xmltext, parser=xmlp)
<Element root at 0x7f4df62b3758>
```
```
>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> io = StringIO(xmltext)
>>> xml_iterator = lxml.etree.iterparse(io, events=("start", ),remove_comments=True)
>>> xml_iterator.next()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "iterparse.pxi", line 179, in lxml.etree.iterparse.__next__ (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:124831)
lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document, line 1, column 6
```

so answer is yes