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 “30,000 killed” 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 “officially registered deaths related to the crackdown likely represent less than 10% of the real number of fatalities.”
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 “30,000” 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 Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist organization – essentially green-lighting another US-Israeli military assault on Iran.
The author of The Guardian’s article is a former fashion blogger named Deepa Parent, who has become the paper’s 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 Guardian’s 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 Guardian’s 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 India’s Just For Women magazine in 2016 was headlined: “Samantha Is Setting Some Serious Fashion Goals! Check Them Out!”
“What’s 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!!!!”
Elsewhere, in an article informing Indian housewives that “understanding stocks is not [as] difficult as the news shows” suggested, she explained that investing was actually quite simple: “like 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.”
Published by The Guardian, sponsored by Omidyar
When the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests kicked off in September 2022 following the death of a young woman in Iranian custody, the improbable Parent suddenly materialized as The Guardian’s point woman on civic unrest in a nation with which she had no apparent professional or personal experience.
Much of Parent’s work at The Guardian’s so-called “Rights and Freedom” 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 “counter-disinformation” 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 she’d received “permission” to publicize a message from a “student” in Tehran who declared: “We are all getting ready to take to the streets and seize important centers as soon as America attacks.”
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 “a first message and reaction” from Tehran. The source lamented that Israel’s war on Iran had ended: “This is the worst thing they can do. If they do this, the Islamic Republic will make life hell for the people of Iran.”
“We don’t need to convince anyone” 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 “decision makers” were moved to take action.
“We don’t need to convince anyone about the massacre the IR [Islamic Republic] has carried out on innocent civilians in Iran,” she wrote, since, “decision makers don’t see trolls’ tweets, they see verified accounts and reports.”
The Guardian’s 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 “anonymous doctor” who she claimed had confirmed the figure after all. This person, who Parent referred to by the pseudonym “Dr Ahmadi,” had somehow “assembled a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces to share observations and data,” 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.
The ‘big lie’
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 article’s dubious data reverberated throughout corporate media. TIME claimed to have received this number from “two senior officials of [Iran’s] Ministry of Health.”
Though the outlet admitted it could not verify the figure, TIME claimed to have confirmed the death toll by insisting it “roughly aligns” 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 “Crown Prince” Reza Pahlavi – the son of Iran’s 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 “anyone” 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 Pahlavi’s dream of re-establishing himself and his family as Iran’s monarchs.
For its part, the Iranian government has dismissed the 30,000 figure as a “Hitler-style big lie,” framing the narrative of ‘mass murder’ in Iran as part of a US and Israeli-led campaign to manufacture consent for regime change.
In much of the Western world, the ‘big lie’ 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 Iran’s IRGC.
“The brutality of what we see has made ministers and capitals reconsider their positions,” an anonymous senior European diplomat reportedly told Euro News.
The official described the decision by Italy and Spain – the last two major holdouts on EU sanctions against the IRGC – as “an important signal towards the Iranian government and an expression of support for the Iranian diaspora,” who the diplomat noted “have called for this for a long time.”
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 “Human Rights Activists in Iran.” The group receives extensive funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout created under the Reagan Administration to distance Washington’s covert regime change efforts from discredited US intelligence agencies.
The Guardian’s Parent relies on State Dept-funded “fact checker”
Parent relied on a similar source for her claim that Iran had killed “30,000” citizens during the unrest in January, when she claimed The Guardian had obtained photographs showing “bodies 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.” Though Parent freely acknowledged The Guardian had “not independently verified the photographs,” she nevertheless claimed they had been “verified by [an] Iranian factchecking organisation” known as “Factnameh.”
By its own admission, however, Factnameh is not Iranian. On its website, Factnameh describes itself as a subsidiary of “ASL19, a private company registered in Toronto, Canada.”
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, Factnameh received nearly $2.9 million from the US State Department.
While Parent launders her regime change advocacy behind The Guardian’s 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: “They prefer freedom from the Islamic Republic & they were being killed by the regime’s forces already.”