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On 24 July, The New Humanitarian (TNH) published an Instagram post recapping the third round of the war waged by the US against Iran. It named four American soldiers who had been killed in Iranian airstrikes in Iraq and Jordan. Missing from the post were the Iranians: 55 people killed in US strikes since 27 June and hundreds injured.
Why was this remarkable? Because TNH is not just any media outlet. It calls itself a “mission-driven, impact-seeking, decolonial organisation” and has made decolonising its journalism a strategic priority. Such claims create expectations.
Not one to stay silent, I raised this omission in the comments section, asking rather bluntly whether TNH considered Iranian casualties not worth mentioning. To its credit, TNH responded immediately, deleting the post within minutes and replacing it with one captioned: “Edited, Iranian casualties added to slide 2.”
The omission was probably not deliberate, but that is precisely why it matters. Nobody had to decide that Iranian deaths were unworthy of mention. Four American soldiers registered immediately, 55 Iranians did not. Adding them corrected the post, but it did not explain how a country with a population of over 90 million people under attack could initially be overlooked. If this can happen in a decolonial newsroom committed to centering people affected by crises, what should we expect from organisations without that commitment?
Iran is a textbook example of a country that is hyper-visible while its people are rendered invisible. I choose this example, not just because I’m Iranian-American, but because Iran is everywhere in the news: nuclear weapons, sanctions, security threats, regime change, and the never-ending Strait of Hormuz saga. Yet, Iranians are harder to find: civilians, political prisoners, journalists, women, queer and minoritised people, aid workers, Afghan migrants and refugees – people surviving and dying because of decisions they never made.
That invisibility matters far beyond whether a decolonial newsroom acknowledges deaths caused by an imperial power: When Trump threatens the annihilation of Iranian civilisation, the silence from media and humanitarian organisations makes these threats politically viable. The silence is therefore consequential.
The Iranian people are doubly invisible as a population caught between imperial violence and domestic repression, a bind that shapes what gets reported and funded. The Islamic Republic has become interchangeable with its population, erasing the population’s agency. After successive rounds of aggression by the United States and Israel, Iran has been exalted as the last bastion against imperialism. The dilemma is that though Iran is rightly aggrieved under international law, the Islamic Republic is also an autocratic theocracy that arrests and executes its own citizens daily.
The right sees only a regime to be overthrown, presenting the violent, illegal war as liberation. Trump’s own rhetoric already embodies this logic of annihilation recast as liberation. In doing so, it usurps Iranians’ role as authors of their own future.
Parts of the left demand a choice between condemning imperialist violence and condemning the regime, as if the two cannot coexist. Kamran Matin and Somayeh Rostampoor call this campism. It protects states, not people.
Iran’s right to resist imperialist aggression is real, and so is the war being fought against it. That is not in dispute. What campism does is take that one legitimate fact and use it to bury another: in this case, that this is a regime with a long record of authoritarian repression now using the war to deepen it. Campism recasts anyone resisting the regime as a foreign plot rather than a popular uprising, erasing the fact that they are the same people risking their lives against both the war and the regime.
Both positions narrow the stories journalists tell, the statements humanitarian leaders make, and the suffering donors will fund. Iranians disappear when they cannot fit neatly into either political camp.
Whose suffering is funded?
Visibility is not just a backdrop to humanitarian response; it is a determinant of it. Money follows attention, shaped by three actors: media deciding what counts as a story, humanitarian organisations deciding what counts as a crisis worth naming, and politicians deciding which victims are convenient to grieve.
Iran’s underfunding is what happens when all three fail at once. Attention does not mechanically dictate funding decisions, bureaucratic priorities and government interests shape them too; but it determines which crises get named as crises in the first place, and that naming is where the failure begins.
The scale should have made failure impossible: Iran has endured four rounds of war in just over a year. The 12-day air war in June 2025 killed more than 1,000 people. The second, beginning on 28 February 2026, killed nearly 3,500 people and injured more than 32,000. Millions fled, almost 150,000 civilian buildings were damaged. Two further rounds of US strikes have killed dozens more. During the most recent, a US missile struck a wedding in Kuhestak, killing four civilians and injuring dozens, including children.
Humanitarian leaders should defend the universality of aid, not allow donor politics determine whose suffering is recognised or funded.
At least nine Iranian Red Crescent Society staff and volunteers have been killed. I work in a sector that regularly insists aid workers are not targets, yet I recall no outrage over these nine colleagues. The contrast with responses elsewhere was flagrant: the same erasure that produced the TNH slide, now at sectoral scale.
International media was present in Iran throughout the strikes – filing, verifying, present on the ground. And even there, Iranian deaths still went uncounted. In Gaza, they aren’t present at all – barred from entering, while Palestinian journalists reporting the same deaths aren’t treated as credible enough to confirm them on their own. That exposes “we can’t confirm the casualties” as a hollow excuse: The only source treated as trustworthy is absent from Gaza and proved unreliable in Iran even when it was there.
Humanitarian leadership followed the same pattern of delay and euphemism. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, made his first (and so far only) public statement on Iran on 15 April 2026, after two wars had passed. It announced $12 million from the UN’s emergency fund. It said infrastructure had been destroyed and services disrupted, but it did not say by whom, nor whose lives were lost, nor that aid workers had been killed – the passive language made military violence sound like a natural disaster.
Fletcher is representative, not an outlier. Many of the humanitarian system’s largest donors are also waging or supporting the war against Iran. Humanitarian leaders should defend the universality of aid, not allow donor politics determine whose suffering is recognised or funded.
Politicians complete the circuit: They protect suffering that fits their alliances. Iranian civilians killed by US and Israeli strikes are inconvenient for governments allied with one or both; those imprisoned by their own state are inconvenient for anyone whose politics require a tidy narrative of resistance. Both categories need a political sponsor to be seen. Neither has one.
The funding record shows what these three compounded failures look like in dollars. The IFRC sought 120 million Swiss francs to help the Iranian Red Crescent Society reach 10 million people. By early August, it had received around 5%. The Norwegian Refugee Council received only $2 million of the $6 million it requested. UNHCR’s $140 million appeal for Iran was only 18% funded.
Not every missing dollar traces back to Iranian visibility, but the funding trend reflects donor interests, diplomatic relationships, and media attention. Iranian civilians did not fail to attract funding because the case was unclear: Media, humanitarian organisations, and politicians alike found them easy to look past.
From invisibility in reporting to invisibility in humanitarian response
Patrick Gathara calls the competition for attention between humanitarian emergencies, the “crisis roulette”, but the wheel is weighted by political decisions.
TNH’s slide showed how those decisions determine whose deaths get seen between and within crises. In Gathara’s “marketplace of suffering”, media and humanitarian organisations force affected populations into a dystopian contest for limited attention and funding. Both sectors invoke neutrality, but neutrality becomes obfuscation when it separates violence from its author or treats violence as the absence of a political choice rather than the exercise of one.
Neglect and disputed evidence look like opposite failures, but they are operations of the same wheel: one population loses when no one is watching, the other loses even while the whole world is.
Sudan has become known as the “forgotten crisis”, as though this were accidental. Media outlets moved on, humanitarian organisations failed to sustain attention, and governments withheld aid while continuing to arm those committing genocide.
Palestinians are rendered invisible even as they document the genocide in Gaza in real time; their lives and voices are erased, casualty figures disputed, and Israel’s responsibility obscured.
Neglect and disputed evidence look like opposite failures, but they are operations of the same wheel: one population loses when no one is watching, the other loses even while the whole world is.
Iran, Sudan, and Gaza are also routinely invoked against each other: Iran and Sudan are cited to diminish Gaza; and Gaza is invoked to silence Iranians. The same zero-sum logic resurfaces inside Iran’s own story, between condemning the war and condemning the regime.
Changing this requires more than correcting a slide. It means confronting the bias running across media and humanitarian organisations, determining whose suffering is named and funded. It also means rejecting the myth of scarcity on which the marketplace of suffering depends: that attention and humanitarian funding are inherently limited, even as far greater resources are found to wage and arm wars.
The scarcity is political, not inevitable, so too is the hierarchy it sustains. Media outlets and humanitarian organisations can treat different humanitarian crises as facets of one system of impunity, not rivals for a fixed share of attention.
