By Karim Sharara – Jan 16, 2026
Mainstream media’s reliance on US-funded “Iranian human rights” NGOs reveals a recycled regime-change pipeline, where anonymous activists are used with opaque finances to treat propaganda like facts.
“2,000 protesters killed, activists say.”
My, my, it seems anonymous activists are really all the rage in Western media, with this headline being parroted (in multiple forms, no doubt). Because if it’s in The Guardian, BBC, and CNN, among others, it has to be “true”, particularly when it’s Iran they’re talking about.
But really, journalistic integrity is about citing sources, and if these “unbiased”, “professional”, and “objective” outlets are good at anything, it’s choosing the proper organizations to cite, which are in no way affiliated with suspect sources.
After all, it’s not suspect if it’s the CIA or the US federal government, right?
**Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA)**Take HRANA, for instance, which is THE go-to “agency” cited by Western media.
Arrest figures? HRANA.
Death tolls? HRANA.
Names of the arrested? HRANA.
Claims of repression cited by Reuters, AP, the BBC, CNN, and The New York Times? HRANA.
According to its website, “Human Rights Activists in Iran (also known as HRAI and HRA) is a non-political and non-governmental organization comprised of advocates who defend human rights in Iran. HRAI was founded in 2005.”
Contrary to the name, the Human Rights Activists in Iran organization is not, in fact, in Iran, but rather operates from the comfort of Virginia, in the United States. Kind of like when you buy Brussels sprouts expecting something European but then find out they were “imported” from California.
HRANA also makes this claim: “Because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from either political groups nor governments.”
Oddly enough, no Western media source has disclosed that HRANA is being funded by the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which was established to keep CIA funding covert, according to its co-founder Allen Weinstein, who had said, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
HRANAwas founded by Keyvan Rafiee in 2006, in Virginia, and according to tax filings dating back to 2012 (when Rafiee only got $59,000 in tax-exempt donations) he is now raking in a comfortable $1 million dollars in donations.
In total, Rafiee has taken $10.7 million from 2012 to 2025, no doubt from “good Samaritans” donating funds to his Patreon.
CHRIThe Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), much like HRANA, is also being cited by mainstream media as a credible source, amassing “over 7,000 international media citations in 2022,” according to its own website. Also like HRANA, it identifies itself as an “independent, nonpartisan” nonprofit organization (seems like it’s a mantra they all use).
With nonprofit being the keyword here, Hadi Ghaemi, CHRI’s founder and executive director, gave himself more than $200,000 in compensation from US taxpayer money just last year for his tiring work in advancing human rights, almost double the $105,000 he received in 2013.
It’s noteworthy that Ghaemi had claimed in 2009 that he had never received any sort of funding from the US government or NED, speaking in particular regarding his work for United4Iran, another organization he founded.
From 2012 to 2024, CHRI, registered as Campaign For Human Rights Inc and tax-exempt since 2011, has received $16.3 million, also in tax-exempt donations. However, because of the lack of transparency regarding the organization’s finances, the source of the funding could not be ascertained.
TavaanaOne of the most active organizations among Iranian dissident groups is Tavaana. On its website, it brands itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative.” You’d think to yourself it’s based in Iran until you’re hit quite boldly in the next sentence with “Launched in 2010 with a seed grant from the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) at the US Department of State.”
Going through tax files related to Tavaana will net you nothing; that’s because the taxes are filed under the name “E Collaborative For Civic Education,” Tavaana’s parent organization, which has been tax-exempt since 2011. The tax filings show that the organization received grants totaling $250,000 in 2011, which quickly skyrocketed to a high of $1.9 million in 2014. In total, from 2011 to 2024, Tavaana received a total of $15.9 million in donations.
Looking at the scope of activities it’s involved in, and how its online courses are about sharing articles similar to eHow on circumventing internet restrictions in Iran, it’s difficult to see where those millions of dollars went… Either that or they were contracted to write the most expensive compilation of e-brochures.
Venezuela and Iran: A Shared Struggle
According to a NED booklet authored by Sherry Ricchiardi for NED’s Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and published on March 13, 2014, “The Tavaana project’s parent organization, the E-Collaborative for Civic Education, has received support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United States Agency for International Development.”
“Program Manager Layla Attia listed some of the project’s accomplishments, including 29 e-courses and 47 webinars on such topics as women’s rights, digital safety, gay rights in Islam, social entrepreneurship, democratic institutions, and power searching on Google. Participants connect securely from Iran to anonymous e-classrooms, and so far none have reported being compromised, according to Attia.”
Imagine being an American and finding out that $100,000 of your tax dollars was spent to teach “power searching on Google.”
Tavaana’s co-founders are Akbar Atri and Mariam Memarsadeghi. Atri has largely been inactive on social media since 2018, but Mariam Memarsadeghi paints a different tale. She is an avid supporter of “Israel”, as seen in her bio, which features an Israeli flag, and has even called for US and Israeli strikes on her own country, the last time being just a few days ago:
This is not a time for nuance.
It is a time for American B2 bombers all over Iran. pic.twitter.com/5MuZNk9l0j
— Mariam Memarsadeghi (@memarsadeghi) January 13, 2026
Perhaps more interestingly, she is also an avid monarchist, who advocates giving power to a man whose sole claim to fame is being born with a saffron spoon in his mouth and who has gone on record saying he doesn’t know what he’ll be going back to, if he ever returns to Iran, suggesting he may live between the US and Iran because he has spent his entire life in the US.
This is the same man who thought showing pictures of himself doing yoga would somehow give him better optics.
One prominent Iranian dissident, Ruhollah Zam, who was involved in directing anti-Iran operations (including teaching rioters how to make homemade weapons through his Amad News Telegram channels), and later captured and repatriated in an intelligence operation, has also gone on record years ago telling people in a video call that he’s seen the late shah’s son practising inspecting troops in front of his bedroom mirror.
Iran Disinformation ProjectOne short-lived project started directly with US State Department funding was the Iran Disinformation Project, after, according to The Guardian, “it was found to be trolling US journalists, human rights activists and academics it deemed to be insufficiently hostile to the government in Tehran.”
Once @IranDisinfo began targeting mainstream journalists for not being radically anti-Iran, buzzers went off, and their funding was cut. “The bulk of the work by @IranDisinfo has been in line with the scope of a project with the Department of State. We have, however, identified recent tweets that fall outside the scope of the project to counter foreign state propaganda or disinformation,” one State Department spokesperson said.
The tweets in question were then deleted, but funding was not restored. The page can still be seen on Twitter, inactive since 2019.
Boroumand Center for Human Rights in IranOne of the most effective organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy is the Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, co-founded by dissident sisters Ladan and Roya Boroumand. Its board of directors features prominent neocon-turned-something-or-other Francis Fukuyama (post-neocon liberal institutionalist is what my search tells me he is, and for some reason, that’s an actual thing), and prominent Iranian celebrities, such as Nazanin Boniadi.
In 2024, NED presented its “partner” Roya Boroumand a medal “in recognition of her leadership and dedication to the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran.”
In particular, the NED statement read: “Roya along with her sister Ladan Boroumand, a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at NED, have dedicated their lives to upholding human rights in Iran.”
From 2011 to 2024, the Boroumand Center received $13.5 million in tax-exempt donations in the US. Before that, information suggests that it was bankrolled by contributions from foundations, such as the influential right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each year per donor.
The Boroumand Center has also collaborated with and received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Curiously, the Center’s What We Do page reads: “Our goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”
One would think that people who are so avid to preserve democracy and democratic practices, even being honored with prestigious awards for their work, would do better than to amplify a call for the firing of Iranian academics in the US asking questions about the Mossad’s involvement in the riots, particularly ones as distinguished as Hamid Dabashi.
On Jan 12, Ladan Boroumand also amplified a post by Iranian dissident Omid Shams in which he discussed how an attack on Iran can be justified under “humanitarian intervention”.
It seems that a recurring theme of Iranian dissidents abroad is how hard they all cheer for strikes on their own country, but none have taken it as far as Masih Alinejad, who seems to have spearheaded the opposition, much to the chagrin of many dissidents who call her an opportunist.
Through her work in VOA Farsi (VOA meaning Voice of America, because it’s an American network), which is directly funded by the State Department, through which Alinejad has called for strikes, regime change, sanctions, and all manner of actions by the US against her country, she has catapulted into the frontlines of the opposition. She has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments for her work with VOA Farsi.
A regime-change ecosystem
So the next time you’re told, very solemnly, that “2,000 protesters were killed, activists say,” it may be worth asking a dangerous question: which activists, funded by whom, operating from where, and with what openly stated political objectives?
Because what emerges here isn’t an ecosystem of independent human rights advocacy, but a tightly interlinked industry of regime-change NGOs, generously financed by US government cutouts, recycled endlessly through Western newsrooms that treat “Virginia-based Iranian activists” as a substitute for on-the-ground verification.
Maybe the real miracle isn’t that these figures are uncritically repeated, but that after Iraq’s WMDs, Libya’s humanitarian war, Syria’s “moderate rebels”, and every other CIA-flavored moral crusade, we’re still expected to gasp in awe when someone from the mainstream has “trust me bro” for a source.
(Al Mayadeen – English)
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