Iran Today

The Dead Children Calculus

by Iran Prism 15 min read

The Analyst

Todd Huntley spent a decade as a Navy JAG officer embedded with special operations forces. His job was to sit in the operations center — not in a distant office, not reviewing paperwork after the fact, but on the floor with the targeteers, watching the same screens, hearing the same radio traffic. “If a JAG is sitting in their office waiting for the questions to come in,” he said, “that JAG has failed.”1

Here is what happens before a bomb falls.

An intelligence team confirms the target — cross-referencing satellite imagery no older than ninety days, signals intelligence, human sources, and open-source data. A certified analyst runs the Collateral Damage Estimate through five escalating levels: Is there anything on the No-Strike List nearby? What is the fragmentation radius of the proposed weapon? Can the blast be directed away from civilian structures? What is the expected casualty count?2

If children might be present, the CDE automatically escalates to Level 5 — the highest tier, requiring a numerical estimate of expected civilian deaths. If that number exceeds a threshold, authorization escalates to the Secretary of Defense or the President of the United States. A JAG officer reviews the strike for compliance with international humanitarian law. Abort criteria are established in advance. During much of the anti-ISIS campaign, approximately 75 percent of planned strikes were called off because the civilian risk was intolerable.3

This system is not perfect. It has failed catastrophically — at a Kunduz hospital where 42 people burned in their beds, at Baghuz where 80 civilians were killed and the strike was hidden for two and a half years, in a Kabul neighborhood where seven children died because an analyst mistook a laptop bag for explosives. These failures are documented, investigated, and — insufficiently — accounted for. We will examine them honestly.4

But the system exists. No other military on earth operates anything comparable.

The IRGC has no Collateral Damage Estimate methodology. It has no No-Strike List. It has no JAG officer reviewing targeting decisions. What it has is coordinated hospital raids across multiple cities on the same day, a regime official publicly confirming the execution of wounded protesters on treatment beds, and a system in which troops fire on crowds without requiring further approval.5

One side built a multi-billion-dollar architecture specifically to avoid killing children. The other side built a school 200 feet from a missile base. The question this article asks is not who is right. It is what happens next — and why the answer determines whether more schools are built next to more bases.

Why They Build Next to Schools

The game theory is not complicated. It is, however, deeply uncomfortable.

When a government places military assets next to a school, it creates what strategists call a “win-win” for the shielder. If the school’s presence deters the strike, the military target survives. If the strike proceeds anyway, dead children generate international condemnation of the attacker — and sympathy for the shielder’s cause. Scholars Rubinstein and Roznai identified this as a dominant strategy: positive expected value regardless of what the other side does.6

The critical variable is not the attacker. It is not the shielder. It is you — the international community, the person reading this, the audience whose response determines the payoff.

If you blame the party that dropped the bomb, the strategy works. More military assets will be placed next to more schools, because doing so carries no cost and significant benefit. If you blame the party that placed children next to the target, the strategy fails. Fewer children will be placed in harm’s way, because the propaganda dividend disappears.

Your outrage at dead children is correct. The question is where you direct it. Your answer determines whether more children are placed next to more targets.7

This is not theory. The empirical record is available.

After the 2006 Lebanon war killed an estimated 850 to 1,000 Lebanese civilians, the UN mandated Hezbollah’s disarmament south of the Litani River. Instead, Hezbollah expanded its arsenal from roughly 15,000 rockets to an estimated 150,000 over eighteen years. By 2024, the Alma Research Center assessed that “every third house in Shi’ite villages of south Lebanon is used in some way by Hezbollah for military purposes.” The ceasefire that was supposed to constrain became the condition that enabled.8

Hamas’s tunnel network grew from roughly twenty tunnels in 2006 to an estimated 350–450 miles with 5,700 shafts by October 2023. UNRWA found rockets stored in its schools three separate times during the 2014 war alone. Civilian casualties escalated across cycles: approximately 1,400 dead in 2008–09, 2,251 in 2014, 256 in 2021, and over 72,000 in the 2023–25 war. Each period of restraint produced conditions for worse outcomes.9

Reinhard Selten’s chain-store paradox explains the mechanism: if the attacker consistently yields when shields are present, it builds a reputation that makes shielding ever more attractive. The equilibrium is self-reinforcing. And every authoritarian regime on earth is watching to see whether the strategy works.10

The Source of the Numbers

The Iranian regime asks the world to trust its casualty claims from Minab. Before examining those claims — which we do in forensic detail in The Minab Test — consider the source.

1988: The regime executed an estimated 2,800 to 5,000 political prisoners across at least 32 cities. It denied the massacres occurred. It has maintained that denial for thirty-seven years. In 2009, authorities bulldozed Khavaran cemetery and planted trees over the mass graves. In August 2025, heavy machinery demolished another burial site under Ministry of Intelligence supervision.11

1994: The AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires killed 85 people. Interpol issued red notices for six Iranian officials. Iran promoted the fugitives — Ahmad Vahidi became Defense Minister, then Interior Minister. In 2024, Argentina’s Federal Court formally declared Iran a “terrorist state.” Iran characterized the bombing as possible “‘self-harm’ of the Jews.”12

2019: The regime killed approximately 1,500 protesters in five days. Its official count was 230. Reuters obtained the real number from three interior ministry officials. Iran’s own civil registration data later showed a 5,000 excess death surge during the protest month.13

2020: IRGC missiles destroyed Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people. The regime denied responsibility for three days, calling the evidence “a great lie.” Bulldozers cleared the crash site within hours. A retired Toronto homicide detective found passengers’ electronic devices had been deliberately tampered with — screws removed, memory components extracted. The regime admitted responsibility only when irrefutable video made continued denial impossible.14

2022: The regime claimed Nika Shakarami, sixteen years old, committed suicide. A BBC investigation later obtained a 322-page classified IRGC file revealing that three named agents — Arash Kalhor, Sadegh Monjazy, and Behrooz Sadeghy — had beaten her to death in a van. Her body was withheld for ten days. Her aunt and uncle were arrested and forced to recant on television.15

January 2026: State media reported “no news of any gathering or chaos in Tehran” on the same day six Tehran hospitals recorded 217 protester deaths from live ammunition.16

The bot test: A Cyabra investigation exposed 1,300 fake profiles posing as British users on X. How was their Iranian control proven? The June 2025 strikes knocked out Iran’s power grid — and all 1,300 accounts simultaneously went silent for sixteen days, resuming with shifted messaging when power returned.17

This is the entity whose casualty figures from Minab are being cited at the United Nations. The regime has been caught lying about every major incident for four decades. Not one significant claim has survived independent verification intact.

The Regime’s Own Children

The regime that accuses others of killing children has killed more Iranian children than any foreign power. This is the regime’s own record — the evidence of what it actually does to children when no foreign military is involved.

Kian Pirfalak was nine years old. He was riding in his family’s car in Izeh, Khuzestan Province, during the 2022 protests when plainclothes agents opened fire. A bullet pierced his lung. The regime fabricated a claim that ISIS was responsible — a claim debunked by the BBC. Then it convicted and executed an innocent man, Mojahed Kourkouri, as a scapegoat. The execution was carried out on Kian’s birthday.18

Sarina Esmailzadeh was sixteen — a gifted polyglot with a YouTube channel. Security forces struck her repeatedly on the head with batons during a protest in Karaj. The right side of her forehead was completely crushed. The regime claimed she committed suicide at midnight — contradicting its own evidence that she died during a daytime protest. Thirteen fake Instagram pages were created to fabricate a history of depression.19

A two-year-old named Mirshekar was shot dead in Zahedan in October 2022. Three-year-old Hosna Bameri was killed during the 2019 Mahshahr assault. In January 2026, at least 236 minors were among the 7,007 confirmed dead documented by HRANA’s “Crimson Winter” report.20

Iran leads the world in executing juvenile offenders — 93 of 138 worldwide since 1990, more than twice every other country combined. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated: “No other State comes even remotely close.” Ali Najafi was taken to the gallows nine times before his execution. Hamidreza Azari was executed at seventeen — state media deliberately falsified his age in the broadcast, claiming he was eighteen. IHR obtained his identity documents proving the deception.21

During the Iran-Iraq War, 550,000 students were sent to the frontlines. Iran’s own state media acknowledges that 36,000 child soldiers were killed. Khomeini issued a fatwa: “As long as the front lines need forces, going to the front lines is mandatory, and parental consent is not a condition.” A former child soldier, recruited at fourteen, described the aftermath decades later: “I am still tortured by bodies without heads, by bodies torn apart and by horrifying sounds of explosions. I see all of them in my nightmares.”22

A government that shoots nine-year-olds in their family cars and charges their parents for the bullets does not grieve when children die near military bases. It calculates.

The Math Nobody Wants to Do

The image of a dead child bypasses every analytical faculty you possess. That is not a flaw in you — it is human. It is also exactly what the regime is counting on.

The philosopher Saba Bazargan-Forward described the mechanism: the shielding actor “intentionally denies you the option of preventing both of two distinct harms” specifically “in order to provide you with a moral reason to commit or allow the lesser of the two harms.” The shielder creates a situation where your only choices are terrible — then bets that your horror at the immediate, visible harm will override your capacity to think about the strategic consequence of yielding.23

You have had the experience of watching someone exploit your compassion — a charity that turns out to be a scam, a story designed to manipulate rather than inform. The feeling of realizing your empathy was weaponized against you — that is the feeling this article is about.

Here is the calculus — not an answer, but the honest statement of the problem.

The United States spends billions on targeting precision specifically to avoid civilian deaths. The system fails — we documented the failures above — but it exists, it is investigated, it produces accountability, however imperfect. The IRGC spends nothing on civilian protection and deliberately creates conditions for civilian deaths.

If the human shield strategy works — if international pressure stops the strikes and the regime survives — the regime continues killing thousands of its own people, including children. It continues executing juveniles at a rate unmatched anywhere on earth. It continues ransoming bodies back to families. It continues operating a five-stage pipeline that converts murdered protesters into propaganda for the next round of murder.24

If the strategy fails — if the world correctly identifies the shielder as responsible — the regime’s most potent propaganda tool is neutralized. Fewer military assets are placed next to schools, because the propaganda dividend disappears. Over time, fewer children are placed in the line of fire.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar stated the logic with perfect clarity in 2018: “We decided to turn that which is most dear to us — the bodies of our women and children — into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality.” A captured Hamas military manual instructed fighters to “use populated civilian areas so that it increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers.”25

This is not a comfortable calculation. It requires holding two truths simultaneously: children’s deaths are tragic, and the regime engineered the conditions that produced them. The alternative — rewarding the strategy — produces more dead children over time, not fewer. Every period of restraint in the historical record was followed by expanded shield infrastructure and ultimately worse outcomes.

Honest people can disagree about where to draw the line. What honest people cannot do is pretend the line does not exist — or that refusing to engage with the calculus is morally neutral. Refusing to engage is itself a choice. It is the choice the regime is counting on.26

The Question

Return to the targeting cell.

An analyst is looking at a satellite image. There is a military target — an IRGC missile brigade base that controls approaches to the Strait of Hormuz. There is a school 200 feet away. CNN satellite imagery shows the school “previously appears to have been part of the base” before being separated since at least 2016. The school is part of a 32-school IRGC Navy recruitment network. It is Saturday morning, Iran’s first workday. One hundred and seventy girls are inside.27

The JAG officer is on the floor. The CDE analyst has run the model. The abort criteria are clear.

What should happen next?

And who is responsible for the fact that the question has to be asked at all?

The regime has calculated that your empathy for dead children will protect it from accountability. It is betting that you cannot hold two truths simultaneously: that dead children are tragic and that the regime engineered their deaths. If the bet succeeds, more children will be placed next to more targets — in Iran, and in every country where authoritarians are watching to see whether the strategy works.28

The people who engage with this calculus honestly are not the ones who care less about children. They are the ones who care enough to ask which response saves more of them.

The dead children calculus is a question that demands you sit with the discomfort of competing moral claims — and recognize that the discomfort itself is the weapon. The regime manufactured it. What you do with it is yours to decide.

For how the US targeting system actually works, see How Targeting Actually Works. For the regime’s full record of deception, see The Credibility Ledger. For the game theory of looking away, see The Price of Looking Away.

Footnotes

  1. Todd Huntley, former Navy JAG officer supporting special operations 2006-2016. Quote from interview on the role of legal advisors in targeting. Source: IR-37 report. ↩

  2. Joint Targeting Cycle (JP 3-60): six phases from commander’s objectives through combat assessment. CDE methodology per CJCSI 3160.01C: five escalating levels. IMINT imagery must be no older than 90 days. Source: US DoD doctrine. ↩

  3. Involuntary or unwitting human shields automatically elevate a target to CDE Level 5. Authorization escalation: strikes expected to cause 30+ civilian casualties required SecDef/Presidential approval during 2003 Iraq invasion. 75% abort rate during anti-ISIS campaign documented by multiple sources. ↩

  4. Kunduz MSF hospital (October 3, 2015): 42 killed, wrong building targeted, attack continued 30 minutes after MSF notification. Baghuz (March 18, 2019): ~80 killed, concealed for 2.5 years, bulldozed. Kabul (August 29, 2021): 10 civilians including 7 children killed, target was aid worker Zemari Ahmadi. Sources: MSF, NYT investigations, Pentagon reviews. ↩

  5. IRGC operational patterns documented by AP (February 27, 2026 investigation): coordinated hospital raids, seizure of wounded, blocking of medical care across multiple cities simultaneously. Javad Tajik (Behesht Zahra cemetery head) publicly confirmed systematic execution of wounded on treatment beds. ↩

  6. Rubinstein and Roznai (2011, Stanford Law and Policy Review): human shields create a “win-win” for the shielding actor. Shield strategy as dominant strategy: positive expected value regardless of striking actor’s response. ↩

  7. International community response as the critical variable in the three-player game. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966): military strategy as “the art of coercion, intimidation and deterrence.” ↩

  8. Hezbollah post-2006 rearmament: roughly 15,000 rockets to an estimated 150,000 over 18 years. Alma Research Center: “every third house in Shi’ite villages of south Lebanon is used in some way by Hezbollah for military purposes.” ↩

  9. Hamas tunnel network growth: ~20 tunnels (2006), ~100km (2014), 350-450 miles with 5,700 shafts (October 2023). UNRWA rockets in schools (2014). Casualty escalation across cycles. Sources: multiple intelligence assessments, UNRWA reports. ↩

  10. Reinhard Selten’s chain-store paradox: if the striking actor consistently yields when shields are present, shielding becomes ever more attractive. Self-reinforcing perverse equilibrium. ↩

  11. 1988 prison massacres: estimated 2,800-5,000 killed across 32+ cities. 37 years of denial. Khavaran bulldozed 2009. Section 41 of Behesht Zahra demolished August 2025. Sources: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Iran Human Rights. ↩

  12. AMIA bombing, Buenos Aires, July 18, 1994: 85 killed. Interpol red notices for 6 Iranian officials. Vahidi promoted to Defense Minister (2009), Interior Minister (2021). Argentina declared Iran “terrorist state” (April 2024). Tehran Times “‘self-harm’ of the Jews” (2024). ↩

  13. November 2019 protests: ~1,500 killed in five days. Regime claimed ~230. Reuters: three interior ministry officials. Civil registration excess deaths: 5,000 surge. ↩

  14. PS752, January 8, 2020: 176 killed. Three days denial. Crash site bulldozed within hours. Device tampering documented by retired Toronto homicide detective. Admission only after NYT/Bellingcat video verification. ↩

  15. Nika Shakarami, age 16. BBC Eye investigation: 322-page IRGC classified file. Three named agents. Death certificate: “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object.” Body withheld 10 days. Aunt and uncle arrested. ↩

  16. State media “no chaos” claim on day of 217 protester deaths at six Tehran hospitals. Source: AP, Iran Human Rights. ↩

  17. Cyabra investigation: 1,300 fake profiles posing as British users. Iranian control proven by 16-day simultaneous silence during June 2025 power outage. Source: Times of Israel, ISD. ↩

  18. Kian Pirfalak, age 9. Shot in family car in Izeh, Khuzestan Province, November 16, 2022. ISIS fabrication debunked by BBC. Mojahed Kourkouri convicted and executed on Kian’s birthday. Sources: Amnesty International, BBC Monitoring. ↩

  19. Sarina Esmailzadeh, age 16. Baton blows to head in Gohardasht, Karaj, September 23, 2022. Regime claimed midnight suicide contradicting daytime death. 13 fake Instagram pages. Sources: IHR, Amnesty International. ↩

  20. Mirshekar, age 2, shot dead in Zahedan, October 2022. Hosna Bameri, age 3, killed in Mahshahr, November 2019. 236+ minors among 7,007 confirmed dead in 2026. Sources: Amnesty International, HRANA “Crimson Winter.” ↩

  21. Iran: 93 of 138 worldwide juvenile executions since 1990 (67%). UN High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein: “No other State comes even remotely close.” Ali Najafi: taken to gallows 9 times. Hamidreza Azari: executed at 17, state media falsified age. Sources: Amnesty International, IHR. ↩

  22. 550,000 students sent to frontlines; 36,000+ killed (Iran’s own state media). Khomeini fatwa on child soldiers. Former child soldier quote documented by researchers. Sources: Javan Online (2022), ICRC (10% of Iranian POWs under 18). ↩

  23. Saba Bazargan-Forward, “moral coercion” framework (Philosophers’ Imprint): shielding actor intentionally creates lose-lose choice for the observer. ↩

  24. Five-stage pipeline documented in The Grief Factory. Juvenile execution rate, body ransoming documented by CNN, UN Special Rapporteur, Amnesty International. ↩

  25. Yahya Sinwar (2018): “We decided to turn that which is most dear to us — the bodies of our women and children — into a dam.” Captured Hamas military manual: “use populated civilian areas so that it increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers.” ↩

  26. Historical pattern: every period of restraint followed by expanded shield infrastructure. Hezbollah rearmament post-2006, Hamas tunnel expansion post-2014, casualty escalation across cycles. ↩

  27. CNN geolocation: school ~200 feet from IRGC Asef Missile Brigade base. CNN satellite imagery: school “previously appears to have been part of the base.” IranWire: 32-school IRGC Navy recruitment network. 170 students present during Saturday morning shift. ↩

  28. NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence: “in light of the success of the human shield practice, there is every reason to believe [shielding actors] will continue resorting to the use of civilians as human shields.” ↩