Al Jazeera reported Thursday that US Central Command denied an Israeli media report that its commander, Adm. Brad Cooper, had urged renewed strikes on Iran, calling the report false.
Israel’s Channel 13 had reported that Cooper pushed for attacks on Iranian infrastructure, including oil, gas and electricity facilities, during a recent visit to Israel.
The accounts and materials focus on January 8 and 9, when anti-government protests were taking place across Iran and large crowds took to the streets in several cities in Alborz, a province bordering the capital. Security forces responded with live fire in several areas, according to witnesses.
Verified footage, eyewitness testimony and information gathered from several cities across the province describe security operations inside medical facilities, bodies left in streets and the removal of corpses in municipal garbage trucks.
Iran International could not independently corroborate every account or casualty figure because of communications restrictions and the lack of unrestricted access. The details in this report are therefore based on testimony and information from local sources.
Cultural sites turned into firing posts
In Fardis, a city west of the capital, a public library was converted into an ammunition store and staging point, while schools and mosques were used as gathering places for armed personnel, residents said.
Security forces were deployed at a traffic police building adjacent to the city's main cinema, using tear gas, stun grenades and live ammunition against protesters, according to testimonies.
On the evening of January 9, shooters took positions on the cinema roof and surrounding buildings and opened fire on crowds below, multiple sources said.
Forces began firing in bursts around 10 p.m. without appearing to select individual targets, one resident said, describing elderly men in the streets who had been struck by live ammunition or pellets.
Bodies were kept inside the cinema for two days before being removed, several others said. Security personnel also forced residents to delete footage they had recorded.
Gunfire from government buildings
Similar patterns emerged elsewhere in Alborz, where security forces fired from or near government and police buildings.
In Hashtgerd, a city about 70 kilometers west of the capital, forces used Kalashnikov and G3 rifles as well as DShK heavy machine guns. Some of the shooting came from an area containing the local governor's office and police headquarters, local sources said.
Twelve-year-old Sana Tosangi was killed by direct gunfire on January 9 after two bullets struck her in the back and head near government buildings, people familiar with her death said. Shooters were also positioned on the governor's office and a nearby shopping center.
In Meshkin Dasht, special police units used loudspeakers to tell residents that conditions were calm before opening fire after people emerged from their homes.
In Eshtehard, gunfire was reported near a police station and governor's office. A truck carrying bodies was later taken to a largely abandoned cemetery as the number of dead increased, local sources said.
In another part of Alborz, cranes were used to destroy access points to alleys, making it harder to move between the main road, residential streets and medical facilities.
Clinics raided, bodies found bound
Medical facilities in Fardis also came under security control.
The morgue at one clinic quickly reached capacity, while security forces entered another medical facility and detained staff members and wounded protesters. Witnesses said security forces shot some wounded protesters inside the clinic.
Security personnel also took jewelry and personal belongings from wounded or dead women, several people who described events at the facilities said.
“The basement of the clinic was full of bodies,” one resident told Iran International.
Another clinic refused to admit some wounded people, information gathered by Iran International showed.
Iran International's verification team used visual and audio analysis and matched architectural features across submitted footage to identify the dental section of another clinic as the location where some of the images were recorded.
The footage shows bodies inside the medical facility, including several people whose hands and feet were bound. Three people identified by sources as members of the same family were among the dead visible in the footage.
Bodies removed in garbage trucks
Bodies were also left in streets after the shooting, according to testimony from the area.
Plainclothes personnel traveling in vehicles without license plates left bodies in pairs at alley entrances and forced passing drivers at gunpoint to transport corpses, several residents said.
One said that when people contacted the municipality about bodies in the streets, an employee responded by comparing the corpses to garbage.
The testimony and verified footage reviewed by Iran International describe the use of civilian and government infrastructure across Alborz during the January crackdown, from cultural venues and administrative buildings to medical facilities, while restrictions on independent access continue to hinder a full accounting of the deaths.
Mohammad Reza Kan’ani, head of the Environmental Protection Department in the northern province of Mazandaran, said Thursday that the Caspian’s water level was declining by around 10 to 20 centimeters annually, attributing much of the decline to rising temperatures, climate change and increased evaporation.
The Caspian’s water temperature had risen by about 1.5 degrees over the past two decades while evaporation had increased by an estimated 10% to 15%, he added.
Kan’ani warned that continued retreat of the shoreline could have serious consequences for coastal infrastructure, local economies and ecosystems dependent on the Caspian, including wetlands.
About 25% of the Caspian’s water comes from precipitation and 75% from rivers, Kanani said, with the Volga – which flows through Russia into the northern Caspian – accounting for the overwhelming majority of river inflow.
Shina Ansari, head of Iran’s Department of Environment, gave an even broader measure of the retreat this week, saying the Caspian’s level had fallen by around two to 2.5 meters over the past decade.
She described the decline as one of the region’s most serious environmental challenges and said reduced river inflows, alongside climate change, were contributing to the crisis.
Without cooperation among the five Caspian littoral states – Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – the consequences could extend to ports, coastal communities and the wider ecosystem, Ansari warned.
Falling waters meet a renewed legal dispute
The environmental warnings come as the Caspian has returned to the center of political debate in Iran over the government’s effort to ratify the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea.
Hossein-Ali Haji-Deligani, deputy chairman of parliament’s Article 90 Committee, criticized what he called the government’s rush to approve the convention, saying this week that it could effectively reduce Iran’s share from 20% to between 3.5% and 5%.
That claim requires important qualification.
The 2018 convention does not assign Iran – or any of the five littoral states – a fixed percentage of the Caspian or its seabed. Instead, it establishes territorial waters and fishing zones while leaving seabed boundaries to be negotiated between neighboring states.
Iran’s southern seabed boundaries with Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan therefore remain unresolved.
The frequently cited figure of 20% was a post-Soviet Iranian negotiating position based on dividing the Caspian equally among its five littoral states, rather than a previously established treaty entitlement.
Nor did the earlier Iran-Soviet treaties formally grant Iran 50% of the Caspian. Agreements concluded in 1921 and 1940 established a bilateral Iran-Soviet legal regime, including equal navigation rights and exclusive arrangements between the two countries, but did not divide the sea or its seabed into equal territorial halves.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, four former Soviet republics emerged as independent Caspian states. Russia subsequently reached agreements with several of them to divide northern seabed resources along modified median lines, while Iran resisted that approach and pushed for an equal 20% division if the seabed was to be partitioned.
Iran ultimately signed the five-state legal-status convention in 2018, but the agreement deliberately left the final division of seabed sectors unresolved. Tehran also stressed at the time that the method for drawing baselines – an important issue because Iran’s concave southern coastline can disadvantage it in maritime delimitation – remained to be negotiated.
The current ratification debate therefore does not amount to a parliamentary vote assigning Iran a specific percentage of the Caspian. The more consequential question is whether Tehran should fully commit to the five-state framework before its own seabed boundaries and the baseline methodology have been settled.
Pollution adds to pressure on a shrinking sea
The falling water level is only one of several environmental threats facing the Caspian.
Iranian environmental officials have also warned of mounting pollution, shrinking fish stocks and destruction of coastal habitats.
Touraj Sadeghi, head of marine ecosystem protection at the Gilan provincial environmental department, told ISNA that untreated municipal and industrial sewage, waste dumping, petroleum leaks, excessive agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, and illegal fishing were among the main sources of environmental degradation.
Many cities along Iran’s Caspian coast still lack adequate municipal wastewater treatment systems, he said, while rivers carry thousands of tons of domestic, industrial and oil-related pollution into the sea each year.
Such pollution reduces water quality, damages natural habitats and contributes to deaths among fish and bird populations, Sadeghi said.
The Caspian supports distinctive wildlife including sturgeon, Caspian seals and migratory birds, but Iranian officials warn that the combination of pollution, habitat degradation and a rapidly retreating shoreline is increasingly threatening the resilience of the ecosystem.
Davoud Rangi, vice chair of the chamber’s Import Management Committee, said Iran receives around 400 to 500 ships carrying essential goods each year, making any attempt to replace maritime imports with overland transport impractical.
“Mobilizing this number of trucks is far-fetched for us, and even if they were mobilized, transportation costs would rise sharply,” Rangi told Eghtesad News on Thursday.
He said Iranian authorities should not count on land corridors as a substitute for the country’s southern ports because neighboring states could restrict border traffic at short notice and the routes lack the capacity to handle the necessary volume of goods.
Neighboring governments could close a border “with a single order,” he said, adding that the justification would not necessarily have to be political or military and could instead involve quarantine or veterinary restrictions of the kind Iran has faced before.
Rangi said land routes through countries such as Turkey or Pakistan might accommodate around one million tons of cargo annually, but could not come close to replacing Iran’s maritime trade.
“At a small scale, perhaps one million tons of cargo a year could be brought in through Turkey or Pakistan, but 23 million tons, or even half of that, is simply inconceivable,” he said.
The warning comes as Iran’s southern ports remain under pressure from the war. IRGC attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz have escalated regional tensions in recent weeks, while the United States intensified economic pressure on Tehran through a maritime blockade.
The outlook for negotiations between Tehran and Washington over reopening the Strait of Hormuz remains uncertain, with concerns also growing over a possible expansion of the regional conflict.
Negotiations seen as only viable way out
Rangi said negotiations and a reduction in military tensions were the only practical route to lifting the blockade and restoring the regular flow of essential goods into Iran.
Attempting to rely instead on overland corridors would impose heavy losses on importers, he said, because of both limited capacity and sharply higher transportation costs.
The blockade is also complicating Iranian exports, particularly containerized trade.
Rangi said vessels carrying bulk commodities could more easily be allowed to pass, while container ships pose a greater problem because individual containers cannot practically be separated from the rest of a ship’s cargo.
“We are extremely vulnerable on the southern route, in Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, but along the northern and western corridors the situation is much better for exports than for imports,” he said.
Iran’s economy has already come under mounting pressure in recent months from the continuing conflict, tighter sanctions and a sharp decline in the value of the rial.
Surging inflation and falling purchasing power have further strained household finances, making essential goods increasingly difficult to afford for a large part of the population.
