Arman Mahmoudian
President Donald Trump delivered that warning on the evening of January 22, six days after publicly thanking Iran for reportedly halting its scheduled mass executions of political prisoners. A few years ago, such juxtaposition would have been written off as Trumpian unpredictability. Now it reads more like method: strategic ambiguity applied to adversaries, especially the Islamic Republic.
Trump’s seeming ambiguity has collided with an Iranian crisis of extraordinary magnitude. What began as a series of demonstrations over economic woes quickly turned political, with chants aimed at the overthrow of the regime itself. The crackdown has been bloody. Iran’s government has put the death toll from the recent protests at 3,117, while the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) NGO has reported at least 5,002 killed and tens of thousands detained; other estimates circulated by activists and media range in the tens of thousands. But even without an agreed-upon tally, the direction is clear: the state has used extraordinary brutality to stop the demonstrations, and then attempted to cover it up. Iran’s prolonged internet blackout, paired with broader disruptions to communications, has made independent verification difficult and collective response harder.
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