Why 'locked and loaded’ US is still holding back on Iran

In Iranian and Islamic tradition, failing to bury the dead promptly—usually within 24 hours—is considered a profound violation of dignity. Yet many families say they have been deprived of dignified burial and mourning rituals.

The moves appear aimed at preventing public funerals or mourning which could become flashpoints of anger and dissent.

Families of the slain say they have been prevented from holding mourning ceremonies, denied timely burials and pressured into silence—deprived of what they describe as basic human closure.

An account on X writing under a pseudonym, wrote: “I finally got online. I will never forget the moment they shot a 15-year-old boy directly in the head with a Kalashnikov … or the silence the next day when they told his mother if she cried loudly, they wouldn’t give her the body.”

Some families report being notified of deaths only after secret burials had already taken place, or not being told burial locations at all.

Another X user, living in Canada, wrote on X that the family of a slain relative was denied a funeral: “They buried him at five in the morning themselves and threatened the family that if they gathered at the grave, they would dig up the body and take it away.”

One of the most widespread accusations against the government is the use of bodies as leverage. Families report being forced to pay sums of around $5,000 or sign written commitments in exchange for the release of remains.

One such victim was Armin Jashni-Nejad, a 23-year-old petrochemical worker from Mahshahr, who was shot to death by police on January 9.

Two days later, security officials told his family the body would only be released if they agreed to say he had been killed by “thugs.”

Ultimately, Armin was buried by security forces without his family present, after they were compelled to sign a written pledge.

Bardia, who recently left Iran after witnessing the massacre of protesters in Rasht, northern Iran, told Iran International that in some cases authorities demanded deposits as high as 30 billion rials (over $20,000) from families to prevent public funerals.

For most families living through the country's dire economic straits, the sums are impossible.

Further accounts by social media users citing local eyewitnesses describe families burying victims in private homes or gardens to prevent authorities from seizing the bodies.

These reports could not be immediately confirmed by Iran International.

Death toll

Iranian authorities have acknowledged only a fraction of the deaths but assert that of approximately 3,100 deaths, over 2,400 -- both ordinary citizens and security forces -- were caused by “terrorists”.

Iran International has reported at least 36,500 deaths, having reviewed "classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families."

Witnesses report that many victims were shot in the head or chest. Gunshot wounds to the genital area have also reportedly been reported, which some observers say were inflicted deliberately.

At the same time, state television has aired the televised interrogations of ordinary citizens, portraying them as “misled,” “ignorant," or agents of foreign governments.

These broadcasts appear designed to reframe the killings as acts of national defense rather than the violent suppression of mass protests.

A flood of evidence

In the immediate aftermath of the deadliest mass killings, on January 8 and 9, near-total internet shutdowns and severe restrictions on phone communications obscured the scale of the carnage.

Several days later, the first videos began to emerge: black body bags piled into trailers, hundreds of corpses stacked together, or bodies laid out on the ground at Kahrizak forensic medicine compound in Tehran.

In these videos, families of the missing are forced to search among blood-soaked bodies—some partially unclothed—in the hope of finding their loved ones.

Increased access to the internet and social media—largely through the Psiphon conduit—has since enabled a wave of new testimonies and footage to surface. The images are harrowing.

In several of the bodies shown, signs of medical intervention are visible alongside fatal gunshot wounds to the forehead or chest, raising the possibility that some victims were shot after being taken to the hospital.

One of the most searing videos, published on Thursday, documents twelve minutes of a father searching among corpses on the outside pavement of the Kahrizak morgue.

Past the sea of bodies and families collapsing into wails after finding slain young loved ones, he weeps and groans uncontrollably.

"Death to Khamenei," the father whimpers again and again. He repeatedly calls out his son’s name throughout: “Sepehr, daddy’s Sepehr, where are you?”

The video ends with no sign that father and son were reunited.

On December 28, a strike by shopkeepers in Tehran’s markets ignited protests that rapidly spread far beyond their original setting. What followed was not a short-lived wave of unrest, but a nationwide rupture whose scale and consequences now make a return to the previous status quo virtually impossible.

Nearly a month later, estimates point to at least 36,500 people killed in clashes and crackdowns across more than 400 cities and 4,000 separate sites of confrontation. The magnitude marks a turning point in the country’s modern history.

Even before the protests began, Iran was already under severe strain: an economy caught in persistent inflation, an energy system stretched beyond capacity, environmental stress that had begun to affect daily life, and security structures weakened by external shocks and internal attrition.

The events that unfolded after December 28 did not create these pressures. They exposed them, intensified them, and fused them into a single, compounding crisis.

What the data now show is not simply escalation, but irreversibility.

An economy with no cushion left

Long before markets closed and strikes spread, Iran’s economy had entered a phase of chronic instability.

Official figures put unemployment at just over seven percent, but nearly 40 percent of the unemployed were university graduates, a mismatch that had been widening for years. The national currency continued to lose value, the Tehran stock exchange spent most days in decline, and liquidity pressures rippled through the private sector.

Inflation was no longer episodic. Point-to-point inflation rose from about 39 percent in early spring to nearly 53 percent by late autumn.

Even households traditionally considered middle-income were cutting back on basic goods. Reports of installment-based purchases for food items, including fruit and nuts, had become routine.

Fiscal policy offered little relief. The government’s proposed budget projected wage increases of 20 percent, well below the officially acknowledged inflation rate.

Lawmakers rejected the bill outright, citing unrealistic revenue assumptions and a growing gap between costs and household incomes. Similar gaps in previous budgets had already pushed salaried workers and pensioners further into precarity.

The banking sector added another layer of fragility. One major private bank formally acknowledged insolvency weeks before the protests began.

Across the system, only a small number of banks met international capital adequacy standards, while several large institutions showed negative ratios. Credit expansion continued largely through money printing, reinforcing inflation rather than growth.

When markets shut down after December 28, they did so without reserves. A month of disrupted commerce has left many businesses with no buffer at all, while reports of burned commercial districts and threatened asset seizures have compounded losses.

Even under optimistic assumptions, restoring activity would require vast public spending. The resources to do so are no longer visible.

Energy and limits of revenue

Energy has long been treated as Iran’s most reliable economic lever. That assumption has eroded.

Oil exports never fully recovered from earlier sanctions, and recent enforcement efforts further narrowed room for maneuver.

Other energy sales once described as insulated – particularly gas and electricity exports to neighboring countries – have also come under pressure.

At the same time, domestic shortages intensified.

Power plants turned to heavy fuel oil, worsening air pollution, while export volumes were quietly reduced to meet internal demand.

The contradiction became structural: exporting energy reduced domestic stability, while keeping energy at home limited revenue.

These constraints matter because energy income underpins much of public spending, including security outlays. Budget plans approved in December to bolster military capabilities for the next Iranian year depend heavily on oil-backed revenues, funding streams that are increasingly uncertain.

Without a stable energy surplus, neither fiscal recovery nor political containment looks financially viable.

Environmental stress

Environmental pressures have moved from background concern to immediate risk. Official estimates attribute around 58,000 deaths annually to air pollution. Water scarcity has become acute enough that authorities have publicly acknowledged difficulties supplying drinking water to the capital, with rainfall described as the only short-term relief.

Agriculture, which consumes over 90 percent of national water use and employs nearly a fifth of the workforce, cannot be restructured quickly without triggering new social shocks.

Modernization would require investments that current budgets cannot support.

Security erosion

Alongside these pressures, the security apparatus has shown visible strain. Equipment losses during recent regional conflicts, the deaths of senior commanders, and repeated cyber breaches exposing sensitive databases have weakened internal cohesion.

Reports circulating online suggest disciplinary measures against personnel who refused to participate in lethal crackdowns, adding to signs of internal fracture.

Externally, Iran has lost key regional partners, while negotiations with Western powers remain stalled and unpredictable.

Diplomatic defections abroad, including asylum requests by senior officials, point to diminishing confidence within the system itself.

After December 28

What distinguishes the period since December 28 is not only the scale of violence, but its social reach.

If the current death toll is even roughly accurate, millions of people are now directly connected to loss – families, relatives, neighbors – creating a reservoir of anger that cannot be neutralized through force alone.

Inside the country, prolonged internet disruptions have obscured events, but not halted them. Outside, large diaspora communities have mobilized in parallel, amplifying pressure and attention.

Taken together, the figures sketch a stark conclusion. The crises that existed before December 28 were severe but fragmented. The response to the protests fused them into a single, systemic break. Reversing that break would require resources, legitimacy, and internal cohesion that no longer appear to exist.

The numbers, more than the slogans, explain why there is no going back.

Golden Owl, an open-source intelligence research initiative, said its investigation found thousands of coordinated accounts on X and Instagram working in support of the Iranian state, amplifying regime narratives while targeting opposition voices.

The group said it analyzed nearly 8,000 account records on X, identifying more than 7,500 unique accounts operating in what it described as a state-aligned network.

According to the findings, about 500 accounts acted as high-impact “originators” producing narratives, while more than 2,500 others functioned as amplifiers, reposting content at volumes consistent with centralized or automated control.

Golden Owl said the network showed clear signs of coordination, including synchronized messaging, mass account creation around major geopolitical events and sustained activity during periods when Iranian authorities imposed internet blackouts at home.

The researchers said more than a quarter of the accounts were created after October 7, 2023, and that the network expanded further during periods of regional escalation and protest crackdowns.

Activity remained high during Iran’s internet shutdown, which Golden Owl said suggested privileged access or operations conducted from outside Iran.

Content promoted by the accounts included praise for Iran’s leadership and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, attacks on opposition movements – particularly supporters of the exiled Pahlavi family – and anti-Semitic rhetoric, the report said.

Some accounts also pushed narratives aligned with separatist or fringe opposition groups, which the researchers said appeared aimed at fragmenting dissent.

Declared locations for many accounts were outside Iran, including in the United States, Britain and Germany, which Golden Owl said pointed to a focus on influencing Western public opinion rather than domestic audiences.

Golden Owl said the findings were based on reproducible data and that some datasets had been published for independent verification.

It called on social media platforms to investigate the accounts and on policymakers to recognize what it described as the scale of Iranian state-linked influence operations.

Blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis estimates that Iran’s crypto ecosystem exceeded $7.78 billion in 2025.

Any figure attached to Iran’s crypto economy is of course partial: both the state and private users have powerful incentives to conceal activity, whether to limit sanctions exposure or avoid domestic scrutiny.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the state now dominates a large share of that volume.

Chainalysis estimates that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps processed more than $3 billion in crypto transactions last year. Israel’s counter-terror financing authority has published a seizure order listing 187 crypto addresses worth roughly $1.5 billion in Tether, a crypto denomination pegged to the dollar.

New findings by the blockchain analytics and crypto-compliance firm Elliptic link Iran’s central bank to at least $507 million in purchases of dollar-pegged Tether (USDT).

That stockpile could supplement constrained foreign-exchange reserves and help authorities lean against sudden spikes in the rial’s parallel market.

In effect, USDT can function as an off-balance-sheet foreign-exchange buffer: accumulated outside correspondent banking channels, mobilized through intermediaries, and sold into rial markets via local exchanges and over-the-counter desks when pressure builds.

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Access, however, is not evenly distributed. Reports indicate state blessing for—or "whitelisting"—internet connectivity for certain traders, even as much of the country has endured a pervasive internet blackout since a deadly crackdown on protestors ramped up on Jan. 8.

When the rial comes under pressure, connectivity itself becomes an instrument of intervention: stablecoin-based market operations still require traders who can connect, quote prices, and settle transactions.

Alternate reality for households

Iran’s central bank has imposed limits on currency trading and transaction flows, while rolling out an anti-speculation tax regime covering gold, jewelry, foreign currency and cryptocurrencies.

The effect has been to raise the cost of traditional inflation hedges while signaling that policymakers now view household portfolio shifts as a macroeconomic risk.

The central bank has moved to cap individual crypto holdings at $10,000, despite warnings from Iranian traders and economists that such restrictions would choke savings and push activity further underground.

On the mining side, the divide is even starker. State-linked and religious institutions are among the largest players, in part because electricity tariffs in Iran are not uniform.

Iran International has reported repeated allegations of crypto mining at state-sponsored sites, including mosques, which benefit from reduced energy rates—an obvious advantage in an industry where profitability hinges on power costs.

The result is effectively two mining economies: small operators running rigs at home or in workshops, attempting to stay invisible, and state-linked actors with access to cheaper electricity, larger facilities, and more predictable protection.

Authorities have periodically blamed illegal neighborhood miners, but some experts see that focus as a way to deflect attention from deeper problems of grid management and governance.

Where the cheapest power is concentrated in privileged institutions and enforcement is uneven, the largest rents accrue not to households plugging in a single machine, but to organized actors with access.

Iran has become a cutting-edge battlefield of monetary adaptation. The central bank experiments with stablecoins to stabilize the rial, while households use the same rails to escape it.

A tightly capped, KYC-only micro-saver lane could offer households limited protection for modest savings while increasing transparency and helping isolate state-connected networks operating at scale.

The unresolved question is whether regulated crypto channels can be structured to distinguish household self-preservation from state-linked finance—or whether policy choices will continue to push both into the same shadows.

Whether the state and its beleaguered citizenry can defy mounting economic pressure may hang in the balance.

Iranian authorities are still carrying out a chain of crimes linked to the protest crackdown, including extrajudicial killings, deaths under torture and the systematic mistreatment of detainees and their families, according to the executive editor of Iran International TV.

Asghar Ramezanpour said the violence has not ended with the suppression of mass demonstrations, warning that detainees face ongoing threats to their lives, denial of medical treatment and collective detention in unconventional holding facilities.

He also cited systematic harassment of families of those killed or detained, as well as continued efforts by authorities to block information from reaching the public.

Ramezanpour’s comments followed the release of a new report estimating that at least 36,500 people were killed in the crackdown on protests, with the deadliest violence concentrated on January 8 and 9, according to classified government documents seen by Iran International.