How to Promote War

A faux human rights organisation trivialises credible data with invented statistics to promote another Middle East war

The latest casualty figure being promoted in certain circles with respect to the recent demonstrations in Iran is 43,000 dead.

The source for this figure is the International Centre for Human Rights (ICHR), which according to its website is based in Toronto, Canada. In the press release concerned, issued on 20 January 2026, it reports the following figures: “Over 43,000 killed”, “Over 350,000 injured”, and “Over 10,000 blinded”.

The ICHR press release states that the 43,000+ were “killed by Islamic Republic security forces”. One may therefore assume this figure excludes members of the security forces and government officials killed during the recent unrest.

Citing “a source within the [Iranian] health administration”, ICHR furthermore reports that “more than 95 percent of the victims were killed during the previous Thursday and Friday [8 and 9 January], coinciding with an internet shutdown, as a result of live fire from military and hunting weapons with bullets primarily striking the head or other vital organs.”

We do know that thousands of Iranian demonstrators and other civilians were killed by security forces during the recent demonstrations. We also know that hundreds of members of the security forces and government officials were killed. Official claims that the government death toll reached into the thousands however remains unverified. There is also no information on how many armed fighters targeting the government and its forces were killed.

In sum, ICHR has put forward a series of extraordinary claims that have appeared nowhere else, particularly its assertion that nearly 41,000 civilians were killed in the space of forty-eight hours. By way of comparison, this far exceeds the death toll of Babi Yar, during which some 34,000 Jews were summarily executed in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during a two-day period in September 1941.

To get a better understanding of the organisation in question and its sourcing I first visited the ICHR website. Under “About”, there is no reference to a single individual associated with the outfit – whether staff, leadership, or board.

The press release in question does however mention two individuals by name: Ardeshir ZareZadeh, “legal advisor and Director of the International Center for Human Rights in Iran (Canada)”, and Ahmad Batebi, “spokesperson for the International Center for Human Rights in Iran in Washington, D.C.,” A third person located in Washington, D.C. is also named for press inquiries.

The International Center for Human Rights in Iran appears to have no independent presence on the internet. Although the ICHR homepage makes no reference to it, it is presumably the same, or part of the same organization.

To learn more I asked a friend, an Iranian academic at a prominent US university who strongly supports the anti-government demonstrations and has been denouncing the Iranian leadership for decades, if he was familiar with the organization or its data. His response: “Never, ever heard of them or seen them quoted. 43K killed tells me they are not serious.”

Even several hundred demonstrators killed by government security forces is impossible to trivialize or escape censure, let alone the credible civilian death toll that runs into the thousands. Why then concoct the preposterous figures of “over 43,000 dead” and “over 350,000 injured”, and additionally claim virtually all of them were inflicted within the space of forty-eight hours?

A closer examination of the ICHR website offers more than a hint. To begin with the press release in question, its sourcing is, to put it politely, abysmal. If a serious human rights organization produced a report with similar sourcing it would – quite rightly – no longer be considered serious.

Secondly, although ICHR’s mission statement asserts its work is based on promoting the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “and other international standards” the press release in question primarily references the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court, which, apparently unbeknownst to ICHR, does not apply to violations committed by Iranian citizens on Iranian soil because Iran has not ratified the relevant treaty.

The statement then makes a quick reference to the principle of universal jurisdiction before devoting an entire paragraph to the thoroughly discredited doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which lies dead and buried in the sands of Libya. It concludes with a thinly-veiled appeal for foreign intervention.

A scroll through the remainder of the ICHR website reveals that its primary focus is on Iran. Nothing wrong that. Except, it does also scrutinize and condemn human rights elsewhere in the region, but very, very selectively. Its exceptionally cursory 2024 “Year in Review” post on “The Middle East and South Asia”, which strains to be taken seriously as a human rights document, references Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen, Turkey, Syria, Myanmar, but – as the Gaza Genocide reached its peak – not a word about Israel or Palestine. Other posts on Yemen clarify that its concerns regarding Yemen are limited to the conduct of Ansar Allah, commonly known as the Houthis.

ICHR’s 2023 review simply descends into the comical. It asserts that in October of that year Hamas attacked Israel “while there was talk of [non-existent] peace negotiations”, accuses Hamas of raping not only Israeli but Palestinian women (in a different post the ICHR’s tally of victims run into the “thousands”, a claim not even Israel has made), and apart from the fictitious victims of mass rape the authors are too obsessed with Iran, Hizballah, and Hamas to acknowledge a single Israeli human rights violation. Under the cover of a human rights review, ICHR seeks to provide the impression that it was not Hamas but rather Iran that attacked Israel, and for which it must be held accountable.

Indeed, ICHR’s main priority appears to be promoting war against Iran, for which Israel is of course a useful ally. Thus, ICHR simply ignores the Gaza Genocide, and indeed any Israeli human rights violation anywhere against anyone. Yet Palestinians are not entirely ignored, as it manages to condemn both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for violating the rights of Palestinians.

In June of last year, ICHR termed Israel’s attack on Iran as “the Islamic Republic’s war” and “merely the latest chapter in the Islamic Republic’s extensive history of violence and aggression”. In contrast to its initial falsehoods about the June 1967 War, in June 2025 not even Israel claimed the war began with an Iranian attack on Israel.

This also helps explain why ICHR invented its outlandish data out of nothing. A figure so shocking, that once given sufficient currency by the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra it can contribute to the justification of yet another Middle East war. The horrific data about recent killings in Iran that we already possess is apparently insufficiently belligerent.

The irony in all this is that those most loudly repeating the ICHR’s invented numbers as incontestable truth – and screeching that war is the only acceptable response – are precisely the same propagandists who have denounced every confirmed and documented casualty figure from the Gaza Strip as fictitious and unproven. Unless and until the Palestinian dead arise from their slumber and provide detailed statements confirming their killing, and produce multiple eyewitnesses to corroborate it, it simply never happened. How standards change.

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