How this works

← Iran Sitrep

Iran Sitrep is a reading aid, not a newsroom. It does not report anything itself, forecast anything, or use AI.

What you are looking at

Every few minutes the site reads public feeds from the outlets listed below. It keeps items that are about Iran and its conflicts, drops entertainment, sport, opinion and section landing pages, and groups headlines that report the same event. Each group is shown once, with every outlet that carried it and a link to each original article. The site never rewrites or summarises a headline.

Status labels

Labels come from two things only: the type of outlet and the wording of the headline. They describe how a story is being reported. They do not say whether it is true, because the site cannot check that.

Widely reported
Two or more independent outlets of the official, wire, major, regional or monitor types carry it. A republished wire dispatch counts once (for example, Al-Monitor reprinting Reuters). Aggregators such as Yahoo never count. Many outlets repeating one claim shows the claim was made, not that it is correct.
Claim
The headline uses claim wording (claims, alleges, accuses, insists) with no confirmation wording. Shown even when many outlets report that the claim was made.
Disputed
Two or more independent outlets carry the story and at least one headline carries a denial (denies, rejects, disputes).
One perspective
Only state-run outlets, or only exile outlets, carry it so far. Read it as one side's account.
Official statement
Only the official body itself is the source, for example a ministry or military command statement.
Single source
One outlet has reported it so far. This is the default and says nothing against the story.

These rules are blunt on purpose. They will sometimes be wrong, for example when a headline paraphrases a claim without using claim wording. When that happens, see Corrections.

What “Latest” ranks by

The top stories are ordered by recency, the number of independent outlets, the type of the leading outlet, the topic, and urgency words in the headlines (killed, intercepted, resigns, ceasefire). One-sided stories rank lower. Explainers and live-blog pages are ranked down further. A person decides none of this.

Coverage tempo

For each topic, the number of distinct stories first reported in the last six hours compared with that topic's average six-hour count over the last 48 hours. Quiet, Normal, Elevated and Surge describe how fast the news is moving. They are not forecasts and say nothing about what will happen. Stories carried only by state-run outlets are not counted, so a government's output volume cannot move the indicator.

Source types

Official
A government, military or international body speaking for itself.
Wire
News agencies whose copy other outlets republish.
Major outlet
Large international newsrooms.
Regional
Regional outlets with a national-security or Middle East focus.
Monitor / NGO
Monitors and rights groups.
Exile media
Exile or diaspora outlets that are openly opposed to the Iranian state.
State media
Outlets owned or directed by a government. Shown so you can see what a government says, never counted as independent confirmation.

Sources read

Direct feeds (English):

  • The Economist – Middle East & Africa
  • Washington Post World
  • The Guardian – Iran
  • Al-Monitor Middle East
  • Deutsche Welle (DW) English
  • NPR World
  • NYTimes Middle East
  • BBC News – Middle East
  • Sky News – World
  • France 24 – Middle East
  • Arab News
  • Haaretz
  • IRNA English
  • Tehran Times
  • Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO)
  • HRANA English

Through Google News searches, which return headlines with the real publisher attached: Reuters, AP, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, the Times of Israel, Ynet, the Jerusalem Post, and official bodies (IAEA, UN, U.S. State, Treasury, Defense and White House, CENTCOM). Their pages open on the publisher's own site.

Persian-language feeds:

  • BBC فارسی
  • ایران اینترنشنال
  • رادیو فردا
  • دویچه وله فارسی
  • رادیو زمانه
  • رادیو فردا – ایران

Limits

  • The page refreshes every 5 to 15 minutes. The time shown at the top is when the data was last gathered.
  • Feeds can lag the outlet's own site, go down or change. The footer shows how many sources responded.
  • Two reports of the same event sometimes use different words and are shown as separate stories.
  • Paywalled outlets show headlines only.
  • Oil prices come from the U.S. EIA and trail the market. The rial figure is a reference rate, not the open-market rate in Tehran.
  • The site runs no analytics and sets no cookies. The one exception is the live map, which loads map tiles from OpenStreetMap; that service can see the visitor's IP address.