Iran Update March 21, 2025
Katherine Wells, Ben Rezaei, Kelly Campa, Johanna Moore, Siddhant Kishore, and Brian Carter
Information Cutoff 2:00 pm ET
The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) publish the Iran Update, which provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. CTP-ISW publishes the Iran Update every weekday.
Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of the ongoing opposition offensive in Syria, and here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. The Syria map is updated daily alongside the static Syria maps in this report. CTP-ISW ended daily maps of Israeli ground operations in February 2025.
We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
Senior Iranian officials are trying to obfuscate Iran’s role in leading the Axis of Resistance by denying that Iran exerts direct control over groups like the Houthis, likely to avoid escalation with the United States. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered a Nowruz speech to Iranian officials in Tehran on March 21 and claimed that the people of Yemen and resistance groups in the region "have their own motivation" and called Western claims that these groups act on Iran’s behalf “a big mistake.”[1] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Hossein Salami separately claimed on March 16 that the “Yemenis” are an “independent and free nation” and that Houthis make their own strategic and operational decisions that Iran does not direct.[2] These statements ignore that the Houthis have repeatedly highlighted their coordination with the Axis of Resistance prior to conducting operations.[3] Iran leads the Axis of Resistance and provides IRGC Quds Force (IRGC-QF) officers to advise the Houthis, including senior IRGC Quds Force commander Abdul Reza Shahlai.[4]
Khamenei and Salami’s remarks echo other Iranian statements that have come amid US threats to target Iran or key Iranian assets in the region. In early 2024, for example, IRGC-QF Commander Esmail Ghaani traveled to Baghdad to direct Iranian-backed Iraqi militias to stop attacks targeting US forces in Iraq. Senior Iranian officials simultaneously attempted to obfuscate Iran’s own involvement in the attacks and avoid a US response against Iran for the January 2024 Iranian-backed Iraqi militia attack that killed three US servicemembers in Jordan.[5] US President Donald Trump warned on March 17 that the United States could respond to Houthi attacks as if those attacks came from Iran.[6] Iran likely seeks to reduce the risk of a direct confrontation with the United States while maintaining its leadership of the Axis of Resistance—including the Houthis.
The United States deployed another US aircraft carrier to the Red Sea, according to an anonymous official talking to the Associated Press on March 21.[7] US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group to sail from the S...
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