Iran

President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday that an “armada” of American warships is heading for Iran and implied that military force could be on the table if the regime in Tehran continues murdering its own people to stay in power.

Iran has been roiling with protest. Across cities and provinces, Iranians have been risking their lives to challenge a clerical regime that has ruled through religious coercion, surveillance and fear for nearly half a century. The merchant classes — once regime loyalists — sparked the uprising that rapidly drew young women, workers, students, professionals and grandmothers into its ranks.

Hundreds of photos revealing the faces of those killed during Iran’s violent crackdown on anti-government protests have been leaked to BBC Verify.

The pictures, which are too graphic to show without blurring, reveal the bloodied, swollen and bruised faces of at least 326 victims – including 18 women. The images, displayed in a south Tehran mortuary, are one of the only ways families have been able to identify their dead loved ones.

As horrific details of the Iranian government’s suppression of protesters emerge — with internal estimates counting more than 10,000 among the dead — the country’s young, wealthy elite are inciting further rage by continuing to flaunt their lavish lives online as they have for years, as if the nation weren’t on the brink of collapse outside of their privileged bubble.

US President Donald J. Trump’s plan for ending the Israel-Hamas war should have included a provision to stipulate the need for a different regime in Iran. That is the fastest, best and, unfortunately, the only way to eradicate Hamas and destroy “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities” not only in the Gaza Strip, as stated in Trump’s 20-point plan, but also the Middle East.

But … Rapid escalation, caught off guard: Part of why Netanyahu asked Trump to slow down on Iran

Mohsen Sazegara misses the scent of jasmine, the mountains and valleys of home. He fled Iran for America two decades ago and has never stopped wanting to return. Whether he ever will depends largely on the organisation he played a part in creating: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In the first days after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, Sazegara helped to draft the original charter of a new force, known as the IRGC. Exiled in 2005 after breaking with the clerical establishment, he has watched from afar as the force he once imagined as a safeguard of the revolution has become its ruthless enforcer.

After the blackout, the body bags. With the internet shut off in Iran, videos on our social-media feeds of thousands upon thousands of Iranians reclaiming their streets have given way to tentative reports of the fatalities. As many as 12,000 protesters are believed to have been killed in Iran, as the Islamic Republic and its thugs have set about putting down two weeks of mass demonstrations with a hail of bullets.

The United Nations, prominent NGOs, liberal politicians, and left-leaning activist networks seemingly love to frame themselves as some kind of elevated moral conscience for the international system. They speak the language of “justice,” “dignity,” and “universal human rights,” and insist — sometimes with threats and violence — that silence in the face of oppression is “complicity.”

When it comes to Iran, however, where ordinary, unarmed people demanding freedom are being beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and gunned down in the streets by their own leaders, this high-minded moral chorus has all but disappeared.

IRAN: Where are the student protests at Columbia? Harvard? Yale? Thousands of students are being killed daily by the regime in Iran and yet silence from the left. Why? pic.twitter.com/gtzJFCSfAS

— @amuse (@amuse) January 16, 2026

Iran’s supreme leader has for the first time publicly acknowledged that thousands of people were killed, “some in an inhuman, savage manner”, during recent protests.

A violent response to the unrest has claimed 3,090 lives, according to US-based Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), with some activist groups putting the death toll far higher. An internet blackout has made it extremely difficult to get clear information.

In a speech on Saturday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said thousands had been killed and blamed the US for the deaths.

And the UK?

I’m disgusted to see the footage from the Iranian Embassy in London.

The London Metropolitan police beating up Iranians who are standing up for their loved ones in Iran as they are being massacred by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. pic.twitter.com/4zjbDJQDeS

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 17, 2026

Visitors to Tehran’s enormous and enormously luxurious Iran Mall in January 2024 must have wondered who would invest so much money for such extravagance in such an embattled country. The mall is the world’s largest shopping and entertainment centre, with over three million square feet just for its shops, plus giant decorative fountains in a city running out of drinking water. At the time, Iran was exchanging missile strikes with Pakistan over each country’s war with its own Baluch population. It would soon also escalate its intermittent Israel war and suffer disastrous defeat.

🚨 BREAKING: Iranians’ uprising against Islamic Occupation continues

The first footage from Zahedan has arrived. Due to internet shutdown and Starlink signal issues, fewer videos are coming out but the message from Iran is “we are still fighting”. pic.twitter.com/h8uCXzgM12

— Tousi TV (@TousiTVOfficial) January 16, 2026

It has been nearly two weeks since US President Donald J. Trump threatened the Iranian regime with military intervention for killing its demonstrating citizens.

“If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social on January 2, about five days into the Iranian protests. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Robina Aminian was passionate about fashion, posting images of herself on Instagram wearing the dresses she hand-embroidered.

She was also passionate about politics. On Jan. 8 the fashion student finished her class at Tehran’s women-only Shariati College at around 7 p.m. and joined a group of antigovernment protesters not far from campus.

Iranians had been demonstrating for over a week, but Aminian knew that day was going to be different. The protests had been growing in size and expanding to more cities, with calls for regime change becoming louder. President Trump had threatened to intervene if security forces started shooting. Adding to the growing momentum, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the deposed shah, had urged Iranians to pour onto the streets at 8 p.m., the start of the Iranian weekend.

Gripped by a terrible drought now entering its sixth year, Iran’s cities are on the brink of what its meteorological organisation calls “water day zero”: the boundary beyond which supply systems no longer function. This was crossed by Chennai in India in summer 2019 and is now threatening Mashhad, Tabriz and Tehran, where taps in the city’s southern districts had already run dry by early December.

Nightly “pressure cuts”, in which the water supply is halted to whole districts in the capital, have become the norm. Protesters demanding “Water, electricity, life – our basic right” over the summer were already risking a clampdown.

According to the Middle East expert Juan Cole, the head of the regional water company reported in early November that the five main water supply dams to Tehran, the capital, were only 11% full, and criticised the government for its inaction.