About
Iran Monitor is an open research database documenting deaths of senior or otherwise strategically significant figures linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran in discrete, deliberate lethal operations by foreign states or non-Iranian organizations since 1979.
Research purpose
The project was developed to make a dispersed historical record possible to examine systematically. It is not a general register of Iranian wartime casualties, and it does not require proof that every included person was individually selected by the attacker. Ordinary deaths arising from ongoing tactical combat are excluded.
What Iran Monitor adds
General reference works are useful for biographical background. Iran Monitor serves a different purpose: it applies one predefined eligibility framework across the full candidate pool, records uncertainty consistently, preserves reviewed exclusions, and maintains versioned research data so that analyses can be reproduced.
The included fatalities are drawn from a formally reviewed pool of 166 serious candidates. Each public dossier links the person's role, date and place of death, attributed foreign actor, circumstances, and up to three Selected Sources. Permanent identifiers allow the same record to be cited even if transliteration or other metadata later change.
Project lead
Ardavan M. Khoshnood, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Lund University
Founder and Curator of Iran Monitor
Contact: info@iran-monitor.org
Research status
Iran Monitor is a living research resource. Once a scholarly release is issued, it is retained as a frozen, versioned snapshot. Material new evidence may lead to additions, corrections, reclassification, or removal in a later version without altering an earlier frozen release.