A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville

There are growing signs of cracks in the Iranian regime, with increasing reports of defections as Iran continues its deadly crackdown on nationwide, anti-government protests despite a US military buildup in the region.

Hundreds of junior and mid-level officers have recently defected from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated Basij paramilitary force, Israel’s channel 12 reported on Wednesday, citing Western intelligence sources.

Such a development could weaken the regime’s ability to suppress the demonstrations.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly ordered the IRGC to take control of the crackdown in part due to fears of defections by the police and regular armed forces.

“He [Khamenei] is in closer contact with the IRGC than with the army or the police, because he believes the risk of IRGC defections is almost non-existent, whereas others have defected before,” a senior Iranian official told The Telegraph. “He has placed his fate in the hands of the IRGC.”

The Institute for the Study of War noted that the regular Iranian military “is generally less ideological and more representative of the Iranian population than the IRGC, which increases the risk that [army] members could defect.”

However, there have been additional signs that the IRGC, an internationally designated terrorist group, could be dealing with internal dissent.

The Intelligence Organization of the IRGC issued a statement earlier this month castigating the protests as part of a “terrorist” plot orchestrated by the US and Israel to topple the regime. In a now-deleted section of the statement, the IRGC also warned that any “defiance, desertion, or disobedience” among the military would be met with “trial and decisive action.”

“The apparent removal of this language likely reflects concerns about triggering a panic, but it nevertheless exposes the depth of anxiety among regime officials,” wrote Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization also said that it was “dealing with possible acts of abandonment,” similarly suggesting that some Iranian security forces may have already defected or that the regime is concerned about such a possibility.

A Kurdish human rights organization reported earlier this month that the regime had arrested “dozens” of security officers in Kermanshah City who refused to fire on protesters.

Meanwhile, multiple Iranian officials outside the security forces have openly defected.

An official serving in Iran’s Interior Ministry told the news outlet Iran International that he has defected from his post and joined the protests, urging US President Donald Trump to intervene against the Islamic Republic.

Iran International also reported that Alireza Jiranieh Hokambad, a minister-counselor and the second highest-ranking official at Iran’s UN mission in Geneva, has defected and sought political asylum in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, US Central Command announced on Tuesday that it is deploying additional fighter jets to the Middle East, citing rising regional tensions as unrest inside the Islamic Republic deepens.

“The F-15’s presence enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability,” CENTCOM wrote in a post on X. 

A U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle assigned to the 494th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron lands at a base in the Middle East, Jan. 18. The F-15’s presence enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability. pic.twitter.com/QTXgOsOozV

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) January 20, 2026

The US has also deployed other military assets to the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.

Amid growing international backing for protesters and intensifying pressure on Tehran over its violent crackdown, several Iranian diplomats have reportedly made quiet overtures to European authorities in recent weeks about seeking asylum, as senior officials are said to be preparing contingency escape plans and stockpiling resources.

British Conservative Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat said earlier this month that intelligence reports indicate that Iranian senior officials are putting contingency measures in place, “which suggest that the regime itself is preparing for life after the fall.”

“We’re also seeing Russian cargo aircraft coming and landing in Tehran, presumably carrying weapons and ammunition, and we’re hearing reports of large amounts of gold leaving Iran,” the British lawmaker told Parliament.

Meanwhile, Iranian-French journalist Emmanuel Razavi told the French news outlet Nouvelle Revue Politique that Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf is applying for a visa, while a nephew of former President Hassan Rouhani has also reportedly submitted a request to France.

There have been additional reports that Khamenei has a backup plan to flee the country if security forces fail to suppress the protests or begin to defect.

The Iranian leader would reportedly flee to Moscow, following the path of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. However, many experts have cast doubt on reports that Khamenei, who has not left Iran for decades, plans to flee, arguing the 86-year-old leader will likely die in the country.

Defections could tip the scales in favor of the protesters. But even if the regime succeeds in stamping out the unrest, some observers argue the Islamist theocracy has no long-term future in Iran.

With pressure mounting at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.

The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.

With demonstrations now stretching over three weeks, the protests have grown into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.

According to the US-based human rights group HRANA, 4,519 people have been killed during the protests, with another 9,049 fatalities under review. At least 5,811 people have been injured, and 26,314 arrests have been recorded.

Iranian officials have put the death toll at 5,000 while some reports indicate the figure could be much higher. The Sunday Times, for example, obtained a new report from doctors on the ground, which states that at least 16,500 protesters have died and 330,000 have been injured.

Last week, Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting their government, vowing “help” was coming as the regime continued its brutal crackdown on the nationwide demonstrations.

Over the last few weeks, Trump has repeatedly warned that he will intervene against the Iranian regime if security forces continue killing protesters. He also announced that any country doing business with Iran would face a new 25 percent tariff on exports to the US.

In Europe, Germany, Britain, France, and Italy have all summoned Iranian ambassadors in protest over the regime’s crackdown. British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper condemned what she described as the “brutal killing” of protesters.

Meanwhile, the European Union on Tuesday announced plans to tighten restrictions on exporting drone and missile technology to Iran, following the regime’s deadly efforts to crush the protests.

“Europe stands in full solidarity with the brave women and men of Iran who are risking their lives to demand freedom for themselves and future generations,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote in a post on X. 

However, Israeli officials and other observers have lambasted EU for so far refusing to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

JACKSON, Mississippi — Parishioners pass under large banners reading “Embrace Diversity” and “Serve Others” as they file into Sunday mass at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church just north of town.

The church is where Stephen Spencer Pittman, the 19-year-old arrested for starting a fire at Beth Israel Congregation, was confirmed and where his parents and younger brother still belong.

“Nobody had any idea what was going on or what would happen,” Monsignor Elvin Suds said during his sermon a week after the attack on Beth Israel. “He and his family were altar servers and very normal in all respects.”

That sentiment — that the arson against Jackson’s only synagogue came out of nowhere — has been prevalent among the city’s Jews, who say they’ve experienced little antisemitism and that the crime did not seem to fit neatly into the white supremacist violence that has historically afflicted Jews in Mississippi.

Sarah Thomas, a vice president at Beth Israel, said she was shaken by Pittman’s everyman appearance. “When I first saw his picture, I did start to cry because I was like, ‘This could be anyone,’” Thomas recalled as she stood outside the synagogue library where Pittman allegedly broke through a window with a hatchet. “People can be radicalized in so many ways — but knowing it could be anyone is really scary.”

Even as a team of investigators have pieced together Pittman’s drive from his home in a gated community in nearby Madison to a run-down gas station where he purchased the fuel and removed the license plate, the question of why someone would try to burn down the city’s lone synagogue has remained murkier.

That was the main question Rachel Myers’s Hebrew school students at Beth Israel had the day following the attack; she encouraged them to wait for more information.

The details that trickled out in the days that followed suggested Pittman was driven by antisemitism, telling police that Beth Israel was “the synagogue of Satan.”

But that didn’t explain how a white honor roll student from the local Catholic high school, who had just finished his first baseball season at one of the state’s historically Black colleges, had landed on the antisemitic slogan, decided to strike and found himself in federal court Tuesday clutching a Bible in his heavily bandaged hands after allegedly spilling gasoline on himself while starting the fire.

“Anybody who’s in this area will tell you that if he belonged to a Klan branch and did all that, then you got it, right?” Rep. Bennie Thompson, who has represented Jackson in Congress for the past 30 years, mused during a tour of the damaged synagogue. “But if he played baseball? Went to St. Joe’s? I mean for all intents and purposes that’s an all-American boy.”

A ‘spiritual psychosis’

Most perpetrators of major violence against Jews in recent years have been guided by at least a loose ideology. The shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 had long kept a shotgun by his front door that he trained to aim at the government jackboots he feared would bust down his door, before eventually embracing white supremacist views that blamed Jews for mass immigration. And the man who shot four people at a Chabad in southern California the next year had been radicalized more quickly, but his extremism began with visiting fringe online forums and setting a local mosque on fire after being inspired by the white nationalist who massacred Muslims in New Zealand.

Less is known about the perpetrators of last year’s deadly attacks in Colorado and Washington, D.C., but both suspects allegedly shouted anti-Zionist slogans during the incidents and the suspect charged in the Capital Jewish Museum shooting posted a manifesto justifying violence against supporters of the Israeli government.

Investigators have released little information about Pittman, and law enforcement did not respond to interview requests. But a review of Pittman’s social media presence and conversations with those who know him suggest an extremely rapid turn toward extremism sparked by a mental health crisis that had led him down an erratic online path that included attempts to sell a Bible-inspired fitness plan.

“It just seemed like he had started to go into spiritual psychosis,” said a friend who met Pittman during high school at St. Joseph’s Catholic Academy. “He was a really normal person until a few months ago.”

It’s a profile that defies the simplest political explanations offered by figures like Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar, who initially said the attack was “another step in the globalization of the intifada,” or Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president who said during a prayer vigil in Jackson after the attack that the White House had enabled Pittman’s violence by “other-izing our communities.”

Pittman, though, expressed little interest in politics, according to both his high school friend and his social media activity, which until recently was almost exclusively focused on baseball and hanging out with friends.

“He was actually a really great guy, very genuine, honest,” the high school friend said. “Guy you could talk to about anything and he would listen.”

But another friend told Mississippi Today that Pittman had started to change over the course of several years, beginning to post 10-15 times per day on social media, including images of him speeding down the highway in a Porsche and injecting steroids.

Pittman’s parents first noticed a change at the start of winter break in early December when he arrived home from community college and began behaving in “erratic” ways, according to interviews they gave to the FBI.

Tricia, Pittman’s mother, told police that her son had been scaring the family pets and that she and her husband, Steve, were considering starting to lock their bedroom door at night because they were afraid of their son.

But it wasn’t until around a week before the arson that Pittman began making antisemitic comments, according to FBI Special Agent Ariel Williams, who testified at a court hearing Tuesday during which Pittman pleaded not guilty to the arson.

One friend who worked out with Pittman at a local gym called police after seeing news of the fire at Beth Israel to say that Pittman had said he “wanted to burn down a synagogue” the day before the attack.

A new kind of violence

Shortly after Beth Israel opened a new synagogue building in 1967, with two long wings and an elevated roof at the center meant to evoke the Israelites’ tents, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan as part of a violent campaign against school integration.

As antisemitic violence in Mississippi mounted the following year, the Jewish community raised funds at the behest of the FBI to pay Klan informants, which ultimately helped successfully break up the ring of nighttime bombers.

The 1967 bombing, and a subsequent attack on the rabbi’s house, have become an integral part of Beth Israel’s history and are memorialized on a plaque outside the synagogue that describes Jewish support for the Civil Rights Movement.

But today Jews in Jackson say they experience little to no antisemitism and, at least locally, there’s no organized political movement aligned against them like there was in the 1960s, making the arson especially bewildering.

The members of Beth Israel are committed to rendering the arsonist’s attack irrelevant. The fire, fueled by five gallons of gasoline, destroyed the library and caused structural damage to one wing of the building. And yet W. Abram Orlansky, a former synagogue president, said that no services had been scheduled the Saturday when the fire took place and a local church quickly offered space to hold all of Beth Israel’s scheduled programming while repairs took place. “This guy succeeded at canceling literally zero planned events,” said Orlansky, who grew up in Jackson. “I’m pretty proud of that.”

Some have pondered what Pittman’s motives may have been, though, and they generally figure that whatever drove Pittman to violence must have come from elsewhere — and people had a good hunch as to where.

“It’s that damn phone,” said Vivienne Diaz, a teacher who belongs to Beth Israel.

Pittman certainly spent a lot of time on his phone. He was a prolific social media user with accounts on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube. According to a Forward review of his public posts, he did not share any antisemitic content until hours before police say he started the fire at Beth Israel, when he reposted a meme of a cartoon character shoving a Jew into a swimming pool.

His high school friend said that Pittman had never discussed Jews or Judaism until the week leading up to his arrest.

But Pittman followed several Instagram accounts that promoted a forceful brand of Christianity, including The Christianity Pill, which declares “CHRIST IS KING” in its bio — Pittman told the judge “Jesus Christ is Lord” during his initial court hearing — and claims that “Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.”

He followed another account called The Final Stand that boasts it is “spreading what is labeled ‘misinformation’” and warns against a plot by an unnamed group seeking to wipe out Christians. “But we are HEALING,” the account posted in July. “We are waking up from this deep coma we’ve been in since WW2.”

(Pittman’s father told police that he “finally got them” after being confronted about the burns on his hands and ankles the morning after the fire.)

In court Tuesday, Pittman carried a jailhouse Bible and crossed himself several times during the proceeding and bit his nails.

In addition to the Christian content, Pittman engaged with accounts promoting conspiracy theories, like Conspiracy Theories, Inc. and Whispers of Truth, which shares claims that NASA faked the moon landing alongside a defense of Mel Gibson and critique of the World Trade Center’s Jewish owner.

It’s not clear exactly when Pittman began following these accounts or engaging with more overt antisemitic content, like the meme he shared shortly before the attack, but friends and acquaintances say the change appeared to happen sometime over the summer after his first year at college.

During that time, he created a new social media account focused on fitness that he populated with shirtless videos and pleas to help his followers “get shredded” and earn $7,000 per week. He abandoned the account a couple weeks later, around the time he started his second year at Coahoma Community College, a school in the Mississippi Delta where 92% of the students are Black.

On the last day of classes at Coahoma, he registered One Purpose, a website advertising “scripture-backed fitness” that mixed Hebrew terms with advice to limit your diet to “God-made fats.”

Pittman told police that around the same time he began earning money through day trading stocks, though his lawyer dispelled that this was generating any income for his client in court Tuesday: “There is no income.”

An unnamed family friend told a local radio station that Pittman had started struggling with mental health during his third semester at Coahoma this fall and was not planning to return after winter break, a break that his parents — who both work at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson — hoped to use to get him psychiatric help.

“They condemn the terrible sin of this incident,” Suds, the priest, said in his sermon. “They’ve lost the son that they knew and loved.”

Pittman’s parents were not at Tuesday’s hearing and did not respond to a request for comment sent to the lawyers representing their son, who goes by Spencer, or to a call at the entrance to their gated community in Madison.

Pittman’s trial is set for Feb. 23. Until then, he was remanded to federal custody.

A difficult crime to prevent

Lone offenders, as investigators have described Pittman, are especially difficult to thwart. But other antisemitic perpetrators have left longer trails that offered the possibility of an earlier intervention. John T. Earnest’s 18-month timeline from his initial radicalization to the shooting at Poway Chabad appears to be common.

The Anti-Defamation League recently traced the radicalization of two school shooters and found that both had followed almost identical online paths leading up to the shooting. One took 18 months, the other 19 months.

Pittman appeared to move faster, although his attack on Beth Israel was limited to property damage.

“We thought it took 19 months,” Lindsay Baach Friedman, the ADL’s regional director covering Mississippi, said in an interview. “But it’s not a far cry to go from 19 months to three months.”

The contraction in time from when a perpetrator of violent extremism starts becoming radicalized to when they act has been shrinking for decades, which can make it harder for the network of organizations that seek to monitor antisemitic threats and prevent them.

“We need to move faster, and we need to be smarter about how we move,” said Michael Masterson, CEO of Secure Community Network. He said one of the most reliable ways to prevent attacks like the Beth Israel arson was for people to report friends or family making suspicious comments or threats, but that can be harder to do when a suspect attacks less than 24 hours after telling someone their plan — in Pittman’s case, telling a workout buddy that he wanted to burn a synagogue.

Masters added that there are growing attempts by online actors to encourage vulnerable people, especially those suffering from mental health issues, to commit violence. “The material we see online increasingly is designed to reach those individuals and motivate them to act,” he said.

Organized antisemitism in Mississippi is much lower than it was the last time Beth Israel was burned in the 1960s, when elements of the state’s powerful white supremacist movement of the era often blamed Jews for desegregation; the ADL tallied just a few dozen incidents in the state over the past few years, mostly stickers placed by a white nationalist organization.

The more diffuse path Pittman took toward allegedly striking the synagogue does not seem to have centered on the kinds of specific arguments about Jews that often animate antisemitic perpetrators — instead it drew more loosely on what Masters described as a “salad bar” of misinformation and conspiracy theories that often includes antisemitism but is much harder to pin down than the ideologies that motivate organized hate groups.

Orlansky, Beth Israel’s former president, said the synagogue had close ties with law enforcement and had been alerted in the past when the FBI noticed warning signs that might have signaled a threat to the congregation.

But Pittman, whose antisemitism only broke into the open in the days before the attack, never seemed to be on their radar.

“I think we did everything that a congregation can reasonably do,” said Orlansky, the former Beth Israel president. “Hate can come from anywhere — that’s my main takeaway.”

The post How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect appeared first on The Forward.

President Donald Trump’s proposed Board of Peace, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would join on Wednesday, seems like it aspires to function as something like a replacement United Nations. It is a striking mixture of ambitious and unserious — but may still be useful, despite the long odds.

The idea was first proposed by Trump in September, when he announced his plan for ending the war in Gaza. But when Trump announced the Board’s establishment last week, its charter made no mention of the embattled strip. Instead, the mission statement declared that “the Board of Peace is an international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” (An invitation to join has been extended to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been pursuing an unprovoked war in Ukraine for nearly four years.)

That international organization seems likely to function much more like Trump University — the lawsuit-ridden unaccredited institution Trump ran from 2005 to 2010 — than the U.N.

The board is led by a chairman — Trump, naturally — who controls who joins, who stays past an initial three-year term, who leads, how long the institution lives, and even how its rules are interpreted. Every major decision, including the annual budget, requires his approval, giving him final authority over all spending and operations. For those countries that either have the most faith in the project, or the strongest desire to curry favor with Trump, a $1 billion fee — which will theoretically be spent on peacekeeping projects — buys lifelong membership.

Realistically, it would be a mistake for any country to put its security in the hands of a mechanism personally controlled by Trump. Such a structure — with power concentrated in the hands of one man, who would oversee all finances and be able to effectively veto any decision — is incompatible with constitutional government, transparency, and the rule of law.

All of which makes the Board of Peace — whose members so far mostly include Trump cronies, plus, amusingly enough, the always amenable ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair — a dead letter as a framework for strengthening the world order.

That doesn’t mean that the U.N. itself isn’t deeply flawed — it is. That’s particularly true when it comes to the UN’s anti-Israel bias, especially in bodies like the Human Rights Council. But the fact that the U.N. is broken does not make it easily replaceable.

Because the U.N. derives its authority from a set of principles that Trump’s scheme does not even pretend to respect: that peace must be institutional, not dependent on personal whims; that international legitimacy is created by a commitment to shared rules, not proximity to power; and that sovereignty is constrained by law, not by who can dominate the room.

Trump’s proposal does not correct the U.N.’s failures. Instead, it abandons the good stuff, replacing multilateral legitimacy with a private boondoggle.

And what an absurd boondoggle it would be. Consider Trump’s behavior just this week, as he took his quest to wrest Greenland from NATO ally Denmark to scandalized allies at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In a preposterous letter to the prime minister of Norway, pushing his Greenland campaign, Trump shared that because he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he no longer feels obliged to “think purely of peace.” No American president has ever suggested that restraint, stability, or the pursuit of peace should be conditional on personal recognition. Peace, in this framing, is not a duty of office but a favor Trump bestows when sufficiently flattered.

Trump’s campaign for Greenland has rattled the NATO alliance to the core. A collapse of NATO — which has prevented great-power war in Europe for three quarters of a century by binding sovereignty to law and commitment — is likely the last thing you would want if peace were your concern.

So as a global architecture, the Board of Peace is vulgar, unserious, unworkable, and possibly outright dangerous. And yet I hesitate to fully condemn it for one reason: Gaza.

On the disastrous war in Gaza, Trump has done some good. His bear hug of Israel and heavy-handed ways forced Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in a war he seemed prepared to continue indefinitely — thus saving dozens of hostages.

And unlike some confused people, Trump does not pretend that Hamas can be managed into moderation. He appears to understand that the group cannot be allowed to stay in place as a militia, since its continued presence would all but ensure more attacks and more future wars.

Trump is also driven by a sense of ownership. He remains focused when a project feels like his, and the Middle East is such a project. If the Board of Peace appears to be key to sustaining his sense of ownership — and if it keeps pressure on regional actors, maintaining momentum toward dismantling Hamas’s grip on Gaza — then it may be useful, even if its structure is indefensible.

The Middle East is not short of failed peace processes. It is short of actors willing to force through needed change, despite enormous obstructions. Trump’s style is coercive, transactional, and often reckless, but it can produce movement where procedural diplomacy stalls. And in Gaza, movement is critical.

So two things are true: Trump’s grotesque Board of Peace corrupts the meaning of diplomacy, and at the same time, Trump himself may be uniquely useful in this one scenario, and perhaps a few others. I don’t want this case to become a model, but I do want the Gaza plan to move forward. And if this new endeavor may help, despite our profound reasons to be skeptical of it, it’s worth holding out to see what it might achieve.

The post Is the ‘Board of Peace’ just another Trump scam, or a real move toward Middle East peace? appeared first on The Forward.