Methodology

An individual qualifies when reliable evidence shows that, before death, the person held a sufficiently senior leadership, command, policy, institutional, diplomatic, security, intelligence, scientific, or programme-level role, or performed a specialized function of demonstrable strategic significance.

Strategic significance is assessed from the person's pre-existing responsibilities, access, expertise, operational importance, or other relevant function. Evidence that a foreign actor specifically selected the individual for lethal targeting because of such a function may contribute to establishing strategic significance. The fact that a person was killed in a foreign operation, standing alone, is not sufficient.

Rank, affiliation, family relationship, posthumous prominence, or individual targeting is not sufficient on its own. Individual targeting is also not required for inclusion.

The death must be directly caused by a discrete, deliberate lethal operation attributable to a foreign state or non-Iranian organization. Assassinations, defined strikes, raids, bombings, ambushes outside ongoing tactical engagements, lethal sabotage, and comparable operations may qualify.

Ordinary tactical-combat casualties are excluded, including personnel killed in exchanges of fire, aircraft shot down during combat missions, and comparable deaths arising from the ordinary conduct of an ongoing battle. The rule concerns how the person died, not whether a war existed at the time.

Each death is recorded under an event/operational episode (IRM-E). One event may contain zero, one, or several discrete operations (IRM-O) — separately identifiable strikes or actions within the same episode. A person is linked to at most one operation, which must belong to that person's own event; where the exact discrete operation cannot be established, the person remains linked to the event only.

Operation assignment is adjudicated from evidence and is never inferred from shared dates, locations, or circumstances. Operation fields not directly supported by the cited evidence are left empty rather than guessed. Sources cited for an operation are distinct from, and do not replace, each person's Selected Sources. Where only a bounded date range is supported, the operation keeps that range as stated and no exact day is invented.

Two people currently remain linked to their event only, because evidence does not yet establish the specific operation. People are grouped in the same operation only where the record states that they were killed in the same strike or at the same named site; otherwise each person's strike is recorded as its own operation. Operations can be browsed in the Database as a third mode alongside People and Events.

Entries are synthesized from publicly available documentary, official, journalistic, academic, and specialist sources. Each dossier displays no more than three Selected Sources representing the principal evidentiary basis of the record collectively; they are not claim-by-claim citations.

Selected source URLs are also subject to automated periodic link-health monitoring as part of ongoing quality control and evidence preservation. The system distinguishes functioning links and redirects from access-blocked, inconclusive, and confirmed broken links; failure of an automated check is not, by itself, treated as evidence that a source has disappeared or is invalid. The original evidentiary URL is retained and is never silently replaced. Where an archived equivalent is available, it may be recorded separately so that source provenance and access can be preserved.

Primary sources are not assumed to be more reliable merely because they are primary. Interested-party statements are assessed in context. Where direct confirmation is unavailable, decisions may be based on convergent indirect evidence and contextual plausibility, with evidentiary uncertainty documented. Where reporting differs materially, Iran Monitor uses cautious wording or preserves the limitation in the dossier rather than attempting to resolve every open-source disagreement.

The Actor field identifies the foreign state or non-Iranian organization assessed as responsible for the qualifying event. There is no separate public attribution-confidence field; inclusion itself requires that the event criterion has been assessed as met.

Age at death is calculated from source-supported birth information and the recorded death date. Where only a Solar Hijri birth year is known, its Gregorian equivalent spans parts of two calendar years; depending on the death date, two ages may therefore be possible (for example, 34–35). If adequate birth information cannot be established, age is shown as Unknown. Age is not inferred from appearance, rank or career history, and birth dates are not displayed in the dossiers.

Candidate records are reviewed and adjudicated against the predefined inclusion criteria before inclusion. Candidates that do not meet the criteria are retained in the public exclusion register and may be reassessed if material new evidence emerges. Frozen scholarly releases are not altered; substantive later changes are incorporated into a subsequent version.