Exiled Queen Pahlavi calls for National Day of Mourning for Iran’s slain protesters

US President Donald Trump is pressing advisers for what he has described as “decisive” options against Iran, even after pulling back from strikes last week, as Washington moves additional military assets into the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, US fighter jets have already arrived in the region and an aircraft carrier strike group is sailing toward the Persian Gulf, moves that could give Trump expanded military options if he decides to act against Tehran.

US officials told the Journal that Trump has repeatedly used the word “decisive” in internal discussions, prompting the Pentagon and White House to refine a range of options — from limited strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities to more far-reaching plans aimed at weakening or toppling the Islamic Republic.

“This cannot go on forever because at some point I will have to say, ‘I don’t have any idea where this material is,’” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said.

“This cannot go on like this for a long time without me having to declare them in non-compliance.”

Grossi said he was exercising diplomatic restraint but stressed that Iran, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, does not have the option to pick and choose which obligations to meet.

Iran said in December last year it will not yield to international pressure to allow renewed inspections of nuclear sites hit by the United States in June.

Grossi also acknowledged parallel diplomatic efforts aimed at easing tensions between Iran and the United States, saying he hoped they would avert renewed military confrontation.

The IAEA has long sought answers from Iran over past nuclear activities and the whereabouts of undeclared nuclear material, issues Grossi has said cannot be resolved without access to relevant sites.

A family searched for three days for their missing son, a protester, and eventually found him alive but severely wounded at Kahrizak detention center among other corpses, Shahin Milani reported on X on Tuesday.

Milani, the executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC), said the young man was in a body bag, shot, and without food or water.

Hannah Neumann, a German member of the European Parliament and Chair of its delegation for relations with Iran, said on Tuesday that the Islamic Republic is collapsing.

“People in Iran are back on the streets because of poverty, repression and because they cannot survive like this. The regime responds with brutality beyond comprehension. They deliberately shoot peaceful protestors in the face,” Neumann said in a speech to the parliament's plenary.​

“This regime has lost every last inch of legitimacy. It is politically bankrupt, economically hollow, morally dead. It will fall. The only question is when,” she added. “It is our responsibility to shorten that timeline."

The investigation by UK-based investigative media outlet Neutral Point of View (NPOV), published on Tuesday, said the effort aimed to control how Iranian events were recorded on Wikipedia.

"This is what authoritarian information warfare looks like in 2026," NPOV said.

"The Islamic Republic isn’t just killing protesters. It’s erasing the evidence that they existed at all, it added.

Wikipedia edits and Iran’s rights record

NPOV said Wikipedia entries had been edited over a period years to sanitize Iran’s human rights record. The report cited a 2024 Times investigation that detailed key information about the 1988 mass executions were removed, including references to women and children killed extrajudicially and the involvement of senior officials in the death commissions.

Information about Iranian official Hamid Nouri’s 2022 life sentence in Sweden for war crimes had disappeared from Wikipedia, it added. References to the 2018 expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania over their alleged involvement in a bomb plot against dissidents were also removed.

AI and downstream platforms

NPOV said the impact extended beyond Wikipedia because major platforms drew from Wikipedia content. The report said that when users queried AI systems such as ChatGPT about Iranian leaders or events, the systems often drew from Wikipedia articles that NPOV described as compromised.

NPOV said the narrative did not remain on Wikipedia and instead propagated into downstream products and services trained on or influenced by Wikipedia content, shaping what users saw across the broader information ecosystem.

Editing tactics and coordination

NPOV said the operation exploited Wikipedia’s consensus model through tactics including what it called “abrasive deletion,” in which small edits gradually eroded sections before larger removals were justified as trimming or the removal of trivial material.

The report said editors used “source reliability” disputes as another mechanism. On the “2017–2018 Iranian protests” page, NPOV said editor Mhhossein deleted paragraphs describing conditions inside Iran after the protests ended, citing disputes over whether dissident outlet Iran News Wire was reliable.

NPOV said coordinated groups acted as voting blocs on article Talk Pages, while “authorship dominance” allowed a small number of editors to maintain control over most of an article’s text by reverting challenges.

The report said a Wikipedia arbitration case documented editors citing state-linked outlets including irdiplomacy.ir. It also said the so-called “Gang of 40” controlled more than 90% of dozens of articles.

Key editors named in the report

NPOV said two editors exemplified the campaign.

It said Mhhossein had acted as a gatekeeper on historical coverage, citing his editing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's page and other Iran-related topics. NPOV said Mhhossein edited 2,228 pages over more than 11,000 edits.

NPOV said Iskandar323 continued editing sensitive Iran-related atrocity content, including the 1988 mass executions, as recently as Jan. 18. The report said Wikipedia was running a site-ban process against him following years of systematic narrative manipulation, and it detailed his editing history across thousands of pages.

Live battleground: 2025–2026 protest page

NPOV said Wikipedia’s “2025–2026 Iranian protests” article had drawn on more than 400 sources and remained relatively distributed at the time of writing. However, it said the Talk Page showed pressure in real time, including disputes over language and whether opposition figures such as Reza Pahlavi should be included.

NPOV highlighted a newly created account, SwedishDutch, which disputed casualty figures and challenged the reliability of outlets including The Sunday Times and Iran International, before the account was deleted hours later.