The Mahsa Amini protests in Iran, which began in September 2022. The demonstrations were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran's morality police. Photo: Grayzone.
By Wyatt Reed and Max Blumenthal – Feb 1, 2026
Western officials seized on a dubious death toll of 30,000 protesters to escalate against Iran. The number originates with a single, clearly compromised source. But a zealously pro-war Guardian reporter is doing her best to legitimize it.
The claim of â30,000 killedâ during two days of protests and rioting across Iran appears to be based largely on a single anonymous source, who admitted extrapolating that figure by assuming without evidence that âofficially registered deaths related to the crackdown likely represent less than 10% of the real number of fatalities.â
That quote was attributed by The Guardian to an alleged doctor whose real name the newspaper refused to publish, but whose identity it claimed to have verified.
Originating in TIME Magazine on January 25th, the dubious â30,000â claim was quickly amplified by The Guardian, a key voice of left-liberal London respectability. From there, European officials seized on the death toll to justify designating Iranâs IRGC as a terrorist organization â essentially green-lighting another US-Israeli military assault on Iran.
The author of The Guardianâs article is a former fashion blogger named Deepa Parent, who has become the paperâs go-to source for Iran war propaganda, churning out over a dozen pieces for The Guardian driving the regime change narrative against the Islamic Republic since violent riots engulfed the country on January 8 and 9.
Parent has emerged as the face of The Guardianâs attacks on Iran despite having no apparent ties to the country and not appearing to speak its language. Farsi is not listed among the half-dozen languages in which she claims to be bilingual or speak in some functional professional capacity.
Before adopting the surname Parent around 2019, The Guardianâs go-to Iran reporter wrote under the name Deepa Kalukuri. Her journalistic output was largely limited to fashion reviews in Indian media. A typical piece published in Indiaâs Just For Women magazine in 2016 was headlined: âSamantha Is Setting Some Serious Fashion Goals! Check Them Out!â
âWhatâs better than a Little Black Dress for a weekend party? Samantha pairs her LBD with these killer stilettos! We are loving it!!! Have a fashionable weekend!!!!â
Elsewhere, in an article informing Indian housewives that âunderstanding stocks is not [as] difficult as the news showsâ suggested, she explained that investing was actually quite simple: âlike a playing a video game but only your favorite batman is replaced with that stock broker who gives you the right advice to invest at the end of the bell.â
Published by The Guardian, sponsored by Omidyar
When the âWomen, Life, Freedomâ protests kicked off in September 2022 following the death of a young woman in Iranian custody, the improbable Parent suddenly materialized as The Guardianâs point woman on civic unrest in a nation with which she had no apparent professional or personal experience.
Much of Parentâs work at The Guardianâs so-called âRights and Freedomâ section has been funded by an NGO called Humanity United, which was founded by tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.
As The Grayzone reported, Omidyar has partnered with US intelligence cutouts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to promote regime change from Ukraine to the Philippines, while advancing various âcounter-disinformationâ efforts aimed at suppressing anti-establishment viewpoints.
A channel for pro-war regime change activists in Tehran
As the violence in Iran continues to dominate the headlines, Parent has all but admitted to functioning as a channel for foreign-backed regime change activists inside Iran. On January 30, she took to Twitter/X to announce that sheâd received âpermissionâ to publicize a message from a âstudentâ in Tehran who declared: âWe are all getting ready to take to the streets and seize important centers as soon as America attacks.â
Back in 2025, after Iran and Israel reached a ceasefire following a 12 day-long war initiated by Israel, Parent announced that she had received permission from another unnamed source to share âa first message and reactionâ from Tehran. The source lamented that Israelâs war on Iran had ended: âThis is the worst thing they can do. If they do this, the Islamic Republic will make life hell for the people of Iran.â
âWe donât need to convince anyoneâ with actual evidence
As critical observers began to suggest the 30,000 death toll was likely inflated, Parent took to social media to declare that despite being a journalist, she was under no obligation to prove the claims she had printed. The only thing that mattered, she insisted, was that âdecision makersâ were moved to take action.
âWe donât need to convince anyone about the massacre the IR [Islamic Republic] has carried out on innocent civilians in Iran,â she wrote, since, âdecision makers donât see trollsâ tweets, they see verified accounts and reports.â
The Guardianâs Parent therefore admitted her output was aimed at manipulating Western government officials, not informing the actual people who elect them.
Just a day later, however, Parent apparently had a change of heart, and produced an âanonymous doctorâ who she claimed had confirmed the figure after all. This person, who Parent referred to by the pseudonym âDr Ahmadi,â had somehow âassembled a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iranâs 31 provinces to share observations and data,â she insisted. Lo and behold, the number calculated through this murky network coincided perfectly with the guesstimate put forward by an Iranian monarchist operative in Germany who had been the lone source for the figure of 30,000 dead.
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The âbig lieâ
Since TIME Magazine published its January 25 article asserting without clear evidence that Iran killed 30,000 protesters in two days, the figure has become an article of faith among regime change activists and their journalistic backers. Co-authored by a Persian contributor to the Times of Israel, Kay Armin Serjoie, the TIME articleâs dubious data reverberated throughout corporate media. TIME claimed to have received this number from âtwo senior officials of [Iranâs] Ministry of Health.â
Though the outlet admitted it could not verify the figure, TIME claimed to have confirmed the death toll by insisting it âroughly alignsâ with a count prepared by a German eye surgeon named Amir Parasta.
TIME did not inform its readers, however, that Amir Parasta was a hopelessly compromised source. Indeed, Parasta is a close associate of and lobbyist for the self-described âCrown Princeâ Reza Pahlavi â the son of Iranâs deposed Shah. Based in Potomac, Maryland, Pahlavi urged Iranians to carry out violence across their country this January. When that campaign failed, he clamored for âanyoneâ to launch a military assault on the country he left as a young boy with millions of dollars in stolen wealth.
Parasta openly serves as an advisor to NUFDI, the main US-based lobbying group working to realize Pahlaviâs dream of re-establishing himself and his family as Iranâs monarchs.
For its part, the Iranian government has dismissed the 30,000 figure as a âHitler-style big lie,â framing the narrative of âmass murderâ in Iran as part of a US and Israeli-led campaign to manufacture consent for regime change.
In much of the Western world, the âbig lieâ appears to be working as intended. On January 28th, as the massive new purported death toll was being dutifully disseminated by mainstream media, a European outlet wrote that it had been informed that the revised body count had been enough to convince Italy and Spain to finally agree to sanction Iranâs IRGC.
âThe brutality of what we see has made ministers and capitals reconsider their positions,â an anonymous senior European diplomat reportedly told Euro News.
The official described the decision by Italy and Spain â the last two major holdouts on EU sanctions against the IRGC â as âan important signal towards the Iranian government and an expression of support for the Iranian diaspora,â who the diplomat noted âhave called for this for a long time.â
As The Grayzone has reported, mainstream outlets have relied virtually exclusively on Iranian diaspora groups closely tied to the US government for the ever-growing death toll they attribute to Tehran.
Parent was no different, frequently citing one of the organizations The Grayzone profiled, which operates under the name âHuman Rights Activists in Iran.â The group receives extensive funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout created under the Reagan Administration to distance Washingtonâs covert regime change efforts from discredited US intelligence agencies.
The Guardianâs Parent relies on State Dept-funded âfact checkerâ
Parent relied on a similar source for her claim that Iran had killed â30,000â citizens during the unrest in January, when she claimed The Guardian had obtained photographs showing âbodies with close-range gunshot wounds to the head that had been transferred from hospital morgues while still attached to catheters, nasogastric tubes or endotracheal tubes.â Though Parent freely acknowledged The Guardian had ânot independently verified the photographs,â she nevertheless claimed they had been âverified by [an] Iranian factchecking organisationâ known as âFactnameh.â
By its own admission, however, Factnameh is not Iranian. On its website, Factnameh describes itself as a subsidiary of âASL19, a private company registered in Toronto, Canada.â
More importantly, Factnameh is not actually a neutral factchecking organization, but instead another node in the vast network of US government-sponsored entities seeking to depose the government in Iran. Public records show that between 2022 and 2023 alone, ASL19 received nearly $2.9 million from the US State Department.
While Parent launders her regime change advocacy behind The Guardianâs reputation, she has been more unguarded about her views on social media. Challenged on Twitter/X on whether Iranians who disagree with their government actually want to be bombed by Israel, she fired back: âThey prefer freedom from the Islamic Republic & they were being killed by the regimeâs forces already.â
Wyatt Reed
Wyatt Reed is a Blacksburg, Virginia-based writer and activist who spent several years in Latin America.
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath,The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on Americaâs state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
