The American ‘Armada’

Welcome back to MBN’s weekly deep dive into Iran from the premier Arabic-first American news and commentary platform on the Middle East.

As we pass the one-month mark since the protests began, we are slowly getting a clearer view of the brutality of the regime’s response. Less clear is how the world will ultimately react.

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Quote of the week

“We all know someone who was killed.”

— Parisa, a 29-year-old from Tehran

TOP OF THE NEWS

One month has passed since the protests began on the weekend of Dec. 28-29. As the world now knows, the nationwide uprising that followed ended in a series of massacres perpetrated by the regime. On the nights of Jan. 8 and 9, after less than two weeks of demonstrations, security forces from the Revolutionary Guard and Basij opened fire on crowds in cities from Tehran and Karaj to Mashhad and Rasht, using assault rifles and heavy machine guns against largely unarmed protesters trapped in streets, bazaars, and squares.

The reports keep coming in. Doctors and witnesses describe hospitals receiving hundreds of bodies and gravely wounded people with gunshots to the head and chest in a matter of hours, while families queued outside medical examiners’ offices and makeshift morgues to identify relatives pulled from piles of corpses.

The details are horrifying. “Motorcyclists shot a young man in the face with a shotgun. He fell on the spot and never got back up,” we hear. Once again, security forces targeted protesters’ faces and eyes. A source in Rasht says that security forces demanded “payment for bullets” before releasing bodies to families.

How many were killed? The numbers matter because they are the only way to grasp the scale of what Iran’s rulers have done in a month of repression, and to judge how much blood the world is prepared to tolerate before it acts.

Amnesty International notes that “January 2026 marks the deadliest period of repression by the Iranian authorities in decades of Amnesty’s research.”

As of Tuesday, the US‑based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reports that by its calculations, the total number of confirmed deaths now stands at 6,221, which they break down thus: 5,858 protesters, 100 children under the age of 18, 214 “forces affiliated with the government,” and 49 non-protester civilians.

Mai Sato, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, has said the number of civilians killed in the crackdown could even surpass 20,000.

HRANA also reports that the total number of arrests has reached 42,324. It says that 261 cases of forced confessions have been recorded, while 11,026 people have been summoned to security institutions. What’s to become of them?

By all accounts, the forced confessions are chilling. They are broadcast by Iranian state television. “Iran’s feared judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei appeared to take the lead earlier this month by personally interrogating detainees in sessions broadcast by state TV,” said one source.

The regime has effectively created a vast pool of hostages whose fate will be decided in closed courts, interrogation rooms, and intelligence safe houses. Past crackdowns suggest many will face torture, coerced pleas, and long sentences on vague national‑security charges. A smaller but very real number risk death sentences dressed up as due process. The Turan Center asks “Will Iran Execute Protesters?”

An American Armada

“If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind” reads a billboard in Tehran this week, with an unveiled woman wearing a “New York USA” shirt in the foreground. Photo: Reuters

You don’t hear the word armada much these days, unless you’re talking about the Spanish Armada:  the 140-ship invasion fleet aimed at England in 1588, carrying 30,000 men.

Last Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump revived the word. Speaking of Iran, he said that, “We have an armada heading in that direction,” adding that the U.S. has “a big force going to Iran,” although he hastened to add that “I’d rather not see anything happen.”

The armada is now on station. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has entered the Middle East, bringing Tomahawks and strike aircraft within range of Iranian targets. Even as the U.S. president continues to claim his desire for restraint, the White House has shifted from threat to capability. The carrier strike group is a force that can cause real damage on short notice.

This must change the psychology in Tehran. Senior regime figures now have to stay awake worrying not just about crowds and the plummeting rial, but about anything that might give Washington a reason to use the arsenal it has parked off Iran’s coast.

In an interview with Axios on Monday, the president said: “We have a big armada next to Iran. Bigger than Venezuela.”

Yesterday, he posted this on Truth Social: “Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal – NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS – one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, it is truly of the essence!” He also warned that, “The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again.”

The Islamic Republic’s mission to the United Nations quickly responded on its X account: “Iran stands ready for dialogue based on mutual respect and interests—BUT IF PUSHED, IT WILL DEFEND ITSELF AND RESPOND LIKE NEVER BEFORE!”

How are Iran’s neighbors reacting? On Monday, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a terse announcement: “UAE Reaffirms Commitment to Not Allowing Its Airspace, Territory or Waters to Be Used in Any Military Actions Against Iran.” It then added that the UAE would not “[provide] any logistical support in this regard.”

In Tehran, President Masoud Pezeshkian has been working the phones. According to the president’s office, he called Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to tell him that Iran is “ready to resolve issues between ourselves and the United States based on international frameworks … in this regard, we welcome any assistance from our friendly and brotherly countries.” Saudi leadership-affiliated Arab News reported that bin ‌Salman assured the Iranian president that “the Kingdom will not allow its airspace or territory to be used for any military actions against Iran.”

These statements by the key Gulf monarchies position them as guardians of regional stability and dialogue (rather than rallying to Iran’s defense), which is consistent with their public attitude during last June’s 12-day war.

There’s a lot of talk. On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department announced that the United States and forty other countries recently met in Prague to coordinate how they will implement the reimposed UN Security Council resolutions on Iran, including tighter sanctions enforcement and interdictions.

In Brussels, EU foreign ministers are lining up a new package of human‑rights sanctions on around twenty Iranian officials and entities, including senior IRGC figures. The new measures encompass asset freezes, visa bans, and some export curbs on drone and missile components. Yet its authors declined to put the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) on the EU terrorist list, which is probably the step Iran fears most. Nor was there any talk of deploying European ships or planes alongside Trump’s armada.

With so many killed by the regime in Tehran, not everyone is pleased with this tepid response. Yesterday, a high‑profile group of Iranian and Iran‑focused exiles published a statement calling for a bolder response to the naked brutality of the regime and listing six actions the EU must take, including formally designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization. They highlight the fact that France and Spain are now the only two member states preventing this designation from taking place. As the oppositionists put it, “France and Spain are now all that stand between the bloc and collective action against the IRGC. What’s at stake isn’t diplomacy but Europe’s credibility — and whether it will enforce the principles it invokes when they’re tested by history.”

Beijing and Tehran: Slaughterers-in-Chief

Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi bump elbows during the signing ceremony of a 25-year cooperation agreement in Tehran in March 2021. Photo: Reuters

Among the world’s countries, China and Iran are far and away the world’s top two executioners (the next three being Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen).

China and Iran bear other similarities as well, of course: both are hardline, authoritarian, one‑party systems whose overriding priority is regime survival rather than representation. Power is monopolized by a small ruling core (the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China, the clerical‑security nexus in Iran), political competition is prohibited, and dissent is criminalized.

In what can best be termed a partnership rather than an alliance, Beijing provides Tehran an indispensable lifeline. Their ties are built on energy and sanctions‑busting, with no security guarantees. China buys the lion’s share of Iran’s sanctioned oil: in 2025 it bought more than 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports, around 1.3 to 1.4 million barrels a day. That gives Tehran vital cash and Beijing discounted crude.

In March 2021, the two countries signed a 25‑year “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Its text remains secret, but it’s believed that the agreement promises long‑term, heavily discounted Iranian oil to China in exchange for around $400 billion of Chinese investment in Iran’s energy and infrastructure sectors, plus closer cooperation on ports, transport, telecoms, and some security coordination.

On the assumption that the recent mass protests in Iran and the regime’s violent suppression of them must have resonated in the corridors of power in Beijing, I turned to Min Mitchell, MBN’s China Editor and a respected analyst of Beijing’s relationship with the Middle East.

She told me that the recent bloodshed on the streets of Tehran will remind many Chinese of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989. The CCP’s reaction to the slaughter can best be described, she noted, as “clinical detachment.” “Beijing,” she told me, “is not viewing this as a crisis of legitimacy, but as a necessary, if messy, ‘correction.’” She added:

In the eyes of the CCP, the violence is a brutal proof of concept. It reinforces the dark lesson the Party internalized 37 years ago: that a regime’s survival depends less on the consent of the governed than on the resolve of its enforcers. If the regime is willing to weather the moral cost of more than 3,000 dead, Beijing calculates they – like the CCP – can force a stability that lasts for generations.

Min pointed out that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons describe Beijing’s support for Tehran as “maintaining national stability” – the same euphemism the CCP uses for its own domestic repression.

Yet many Chinese netizens seem to have soured on the regime’s relationship to Iran. Some netizens, Min said, increasingly describe Iran as a “bad debt” – “a partner that is expensive to maintain, diplomatically ungrateful, and seemingly incapable of keeping its own house in order.” This shift in public opinion mirrors a degree of collective exasperation with the Iranian regime.

“In the end,” Min told me, “Beijing is backing Tehran not out of affection, but out of cold necessity. It is the support of a liquidator watching a distressed asset. The CCP will provide the diplomatic shield and the narrative cover, but it does so with the wary eye of a risk manager. They will help keep the machine running, but they have no desire to go down with the ship.”

CLOSER

The late Iranian rapper Aria Honarmand, killed by the regime on Jan. 8. Above him reads آزادى “freedom.” https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/2015331062679781421

As I noted in the last edition of the MBN Iran Briefing, behind the figures of thousands killed by the regime there are names and lives. I’ll continue to profile some of them here.

There’s Aria Honarmand, 27, an Iranian rapper who was killed in the Naziabad neighborhood of #Tehran. He’d just released a song called “Azadi” (Freedom) days before. You can hear him here.

And Fariba, a 16-year-old girl killed when security forces opened fire on crowds. When her mother couldn’t find her, the family scoured police stations and hospitals. “They found Fariba two days later in a black body bag inside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center in south Tehran, shot in the heart, her body cold,” according to one report. Officials blamed her death on “terrorists.”

Posting a photo of a grieving daughter to her 16 million followers on Instagram, Angelina Jolie provided this caption: “A seven-year-old girl at her mother’s grave. Parisa Lashkari, 30, killed during protests in Noorabad, Fars province, Iran, on January 10th. No child should have to carry this kind of grief. May her mother’s memory be honored and may the truth be established, with protection for civilians, accountability for those responsible and greater freedom for all those who are seeking it.”

Indeed.