According to Time Magazine, the death toll in Iran is 30,000 or more (most of it in just 2 days).
 
https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000...officials/
 
The enormous earthquake in February 2023 that happened in south-eastern Turkey had caused 55,000 deaths.

Quote:BEIRUT (AP) — This time felt different.

The 25-year-old Iranian fashion designer hoped that mass protests nearly four years ago — the ones that erupted after a young woman was arrested and died in custody for not wearing the hijab properly — would improve civil rights in the Islamic Republic.

Not much changed, though. Being on those streets, she felt, may have been for nothing. But it didn’t deter her.

In early January, she protested again. The sea of people across Tehran’s busy streets lifted her spirits. This time, the spark was inflation and the plummeting value of the Iranian rial — though chants soon targeted the country’s theocratic leaders.

The crowd was larger, more diverse, she said. Protests in Iran erupt every few years. But this momentum felt unprecedented, she said.

The response by security forces would be, too.

Activists estimate that over 6,000 people, mostly protesters, were killed in the bloodiest crackdown on dissent since the Islamic Republic was created in 1979. They worry the number will increase as information trickles out.

The Associated Press spoke with six Iranians, each on condition of anonymity through secure channels as security forces continued to crack down on dissenters after the protests. They said they demonstrated and witnessed state violence against protesters. Four of them took risks to circumvent an internet shutdown to share what they saw, while two spoke from abroad.

Read the rest of the article here: https://apnews.com/article/iran-protests...5f19563cbb

Some factions in Iran like the 2013-2016 President Hasan Ruhani are already calling for some deep reforms. They want a return to republican value with some elements on conservatism as it is the case of other Muslim majority countries:
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/game...26498.html
 
Of course the more extremist wings of the government will have none of it.
 
My point of view is this: Once you take a path that is the path of Saddam Husain, Muhammar Kaddafi or Bashar al-Assad (and murder scores of your own people) you can’t really take the path that Venezuela is currently taking. I mean they murdered 30,000 people and put twice as many people in political prisons.
 
I don’t know if “deep reforms” can change the fact that they just shot on their own people with assault rifles. This only shows one thing: Some of them really believe in what they are doing. In the 1950’s some Germans would say “It’s not because we lost that we were wrong about everything”. This guys will not regret anything they did either. There may be things like suicides to avoid being judged if someone takes Iran like they took Iraq in 2003.

So....does it look like help was on the way, as claimed?

That’s a big issue too. You tell people to “Go on the streets, get the names of all those who have wronged you, help is on the way” and then say “I’ve made a deal, everything is cool”, I don’t know if this has a president in history.
 
But it seems to me that Iran is begging for a diplomacy-based solution. So I guess we will have to wait and see

In my previous I wanted to say “This has no precedent in history” not “This has no president in history”
And things are moving forward. The Revolutionary Guards are now on the EU’s Terror organization list. If we can push just the right buttons the whole thing is going to go down like Venezuela. Is Trump + Netanyahu willing to do that? – That’s what we don’t know. Reading Trumps mind on the international policy level is not an easy task.

Yes it is. How much money is in it for the mad king?

I'm not sure how much weight any diaspora figure may carry inside Iran.

(February 8, 2026 at 1:17 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I'm not sure how much weight any diaspora figure may carry inside Iran.

   It’s the same of Afghanistan. Even for China. They may seem very unimportant, most of them aren’t even Iranian citizens anymore. But they are the ones who have survived this age of barbary and oppression and they are the ones who have maintained the true Iranian culture and traditions. Many of them own businesses in the West and are mostly educated and sophisticated people. So there is always the possibility to attract these people back to Iran (if we can manage to create some sort of country there where the rule of law prevails) and they will simply take it from there.
 
I know this sounds complicated but it is much better then what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan.
 
+ There are similar ideas about Latin America. D. Trump does not care about any of that. But they say there are talks happening right now with the kids of Raoul Castro about what sort of Cuba is going to prevail in the 21st century: The same mechanism that is in place with Columbia, Venezuela and even Nicaragua.
 
But as I said: We don’t know anything about the true negotiations + the IRI is a murderous genocidal regime. I guess we will all have to wait and see  

On one hand J.D. Vance is saying that the removal of the Mullah Regime “will be up to the Iranian people”.
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/iran...55643.html
 
Many are warning that the dismantling of the current regime and the creation of a new and better regime will have its difficulties:
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/opin...p_catchall
 
On the other hand this regime is evil. People whose relatives were arrested during the anti-regime protests are being forced to attend pro-regime rallies. Even rich people who have supported the anti-regime protests are seeing their businesses and properties being taken away by the regime:
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/opin...p_catchall
 
I’ve recently watched something about the Afghan and the Pakistani Taliban (yes there are two of them). In the past Both the US and Pakistan have supported these guys against the Soviets. Then in the 2000’s Pakistan has decided to maintain good relations with these paramilitary groups. Todays they are Pakistan’s N-1 enemy. They are aiming to destabilize Pakistan through terror attacks and are even collaborating with Narendra Modi’s Hindu-Nationalist government against the Pakistani State.  It is said that the final aim of the group is to completely destroy Pakistan (just like Afghanistan) to create some sort of united Afghan-Pakistani emirate with “sharia” rule.
 
With Europe having added the Revolutionary Guards to its list of terror organization I think it is possible to criticize J.D. Vance’s last statement on Iran. And I think Israel + Netanyahu are being very lucid about the whole situation. Pakistan has made deals with the Taliban even at the time of the US military presence in Afghanistan. They even allowed them to flee into Pakistan and carry out actions in Afghanistan they were coordinated from Taliban bases in north-east Pakistan. So what happened to this Pakistan-Afghan friendship now?
 
- Pakistan became the next target of these “Jihadi” groups today. They want to destroy Pakistan (while getting help from Hindu Nationalists in India).
So the best comparison to Iran is Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan during WWII. Both were very strong expansionist powers with a population that was completely brainwashed into and irrational nearly mad ideology. There was no “talking” with these guys. Military action was simply unavoidable.
 
The Iranian regimes (and the Taliban’s) military capacities are of course more limited. But in a globalizing world it is not known who or where they are going to hit next.
 
Besides: The Iranian will never give up their ballistic missile program because it’s the only thing they have against US and Israeli assets in the region.
 
I also think that a point of no return has been reached. If the regime has murdered up to 30,000 of its own people within a week or so, is there anything they won’t do against anyone they consider to be “Enemies of God”?
 
+ Russia and China is helping them in rebuilding their missile capacities after the US + Israeli attacks back in June.
 
/And I want to bring everybody’s attention to the root cause of the problem: