Iran’s crackdown on nationwide protests has killed at least 6,126 people, with many others feared dead, activists said Tuesday.
Iran has repeatedly said it will drag all of West Asia into war if necessary, though its air defences and military are still reeling after fighting in the June war launched by Israel against the country.
A United States aircraft carrier group, including guided missile destroyers, arrived in the region to lead any American military response to the crisis. It provides the US with the ability to strike Iran, particularly as Gulf Arab states have signalled they want to stay out of any attack despite hosting American military personnel.
Two Iranian-backed militias in the region have signalled their willingness to launch new attacks, likely trying to back Iran after US President Donald Trump threatened military action over the killing of peaceful protesters or Tehran launching mass executions in the wake of the demonstrations.
Both the Houthis, the military organisation based in Yemen, and Kataib Hezbollah, the Iraqi paramilitary group, had sat out from Israel’s 12-day war on Iran in June that saw the United States bomb Iranian nuclear sites. The hesitancy to get involved shows the disarray still affecting Iran’s self-described “Axis of Resistance” after facing attacks from Israel over its conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Activists offer new death toll
The new figures on Tuesday came from the United States-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has been considered accurate in multiple rounds of unrest in Iran. The group verifies each death with a network of activists on the ground in Iran.
It identified the dead as including at least 5,777 protesters, 214 government-affiliated forces, 86 children and 49 civilians who were not demonstrating. The crackdown has seen over 41,800 arrests, it added.
The Associated Press has been unable to independently assess the death toll, given that authorities have cut off the internet and disrupted calls into the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s government has put the death toll at a far lower 3,117, saying 2,427 were civilians and security forces, and labelling the rest “terrorists”. In the past, Iran’s theocracy has notably undercounted or not reported fatalities from unrest.
That death toll exceeds that of any other round of protest or unrest there in decades, and recalls the chaos surrounding Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
This round of protests in Iran began on December 28, sparked by the fall of the Iranian currency, the rial. It quickly spread across the country. Protesters were met by a violent crackdown by Iran’s theocracy, the scale of which is only starting to become clear as the country has faced more than two weeks of internet blackout – the most comprehensive in its history.
Iran’s UN ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, told a UN Security Council meeting late Monday that Trump’s repeated threats to use military force against the country “are neither ambiguous nor misinterpreted”. Iravani also repeated allegations that the US leader had incited violence with “armed terrorist groups” supported by the United States and Israel, but gave no evidence to support his claims.
Iranian state media has tried to trace the protests back to forces abroad as the theocracy remains broadly unable to address the country’s ailing economy, which is still squeezed by international sanctions, particularly over its nuclear programme.
Some Iranian-backed militias willing to fight
Iran projected its power across the region through the “Axis of Resistance”, a network of proxy militant groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and other places. It was also seen as a defensive buffer, intended to keep conflict away from Iranian borders.
But the bloc has collapsed after Israel targeted Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and others during the Gaza war. Meanwhile, rebels in 2024 overthrew Syria’s Bashar al-Assad after a years-long bloody war. Iran had backed his rule.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, have repeatedly warned they could resume fire if needed on shipping in the Red Sea, releasing old footage of a previous attack on Monday.
Ahmad “Abu Hussein” al-Hamidawi, the leader of Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah militia, also warned “the enemies that the war on the [Islamic] Republic will not be a picnic; rather, you will taste the bitterest forms of death, and nothing will remain of you in our region”.
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, one of Iran’s staunchest allies, refused to say how it planned to react in the case of a possible attack.
“During the past two months, several parties have asked me a clear and frank question: If Israel and America go to war against Iran, will Hezbollah intervene or not?” Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Kassem said in a video address.
He said the group is preparing for “possible aggression and is determined to defend” against it. But as to how it would act, he said, “these details will be determined by the battle, and we will determine them according to the interests that are present”.
