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The Technical Framing of the “Manufactured Killing” Project and Its Mechanisms

Iran View 24
20 December 2025
8:56 pm
Analysis and notes, Note, The most important news

The “manufactured killing” project should be conceptualized as a multi-stage operation within hybrid warfare—an operation that begins with narrative preemption and, through the chaining of incidents, forces official institutions into defensive reactions.

Tehran- IranView24

The scenario or “manufactured killing” project, as one of the constant components of hybrid warfare against the Islamic Republic of Iran, has a long history and possesses a nature that goes far beyond a temporary media operation. This project must be analyzed within the framework of “cognitive–perceptual operation”; an operation whose ultimate goal is not merely the erosion of international image, but rather the disruption of the domestic decision-making system, the depletion of social capital, and the creation of a rift in the state–society relationship through the production of threat-based perceptions.
A review of historical trends shows that from the early decades after the Islamic Revolution to the present, any event with human, emotional, or symbolic potential has quickly been incorporated into a manufactured killing operation by adversaries. Under this scenario, suspicious deaths, urban accidents, law-enforcement confrontations, medical incidents, and even events occurring outside Iran’s geography—if they possess a narratively engineerable link—are activated within this model.The case of the death of Khosro Alikordi in Mashhad and the attack on the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney are among the most recent incidents that, from an analytical perspective, display these very characteristics—events that, even before official truth-finding processes were completed, were rapidly elevated from an “incident” to a “strategic accusation” against Iran.In the manufactured killing project, the central issue is not what actually happened, but rather what “perception must be constructed” from it. In the logic of cognitive warfare, objective reality is of secondary importance; what is decisive is the establishment of a dominant narrative in the shortest possible time. Accordingly, incidents within this scenario almost always follow a fixed process and structure:

1. Narrative preemption and time engineering: The first operational layer in the manufactured killing scenario is preemption in the narrative arena. This preemption is based on a precise understanding of the effect of cognitive primacy and anchoring bias in public opinion. By rapidly disseminating an accusatory narrative, the audience’s mind is fixed around a “semantic anchor”—one in which Iran is placed in the position of the accused from the very outset.
At this stage, a lack of information, technical ambiguities, or the absence of an official report not only fails to hinder narrative construction, but is regarded as an operational advantage. The information vacuum provides an ideal platform for injecting directed narratives. Any delay in an official response effectively amounts to ceding ground to the opposing side in the perceptual battle.
Importantly, due to the history and repeatability of this tactic, opposing intelligence and security services have now acquired a set of tools, infrastructures, and operational patterns that enable them to swiftly and systematically capitalize on incidents and events.

2. Targeted symbol-making and elevation from incident to symbolic level: In this scenario, narrative-construction think tanks rapidly use pre-positioned human resources and advanced infrastructures to abstract the deceased or injured individual into a symbolic figure, thereby exerting a stronger emotional impact on public opinion and turning them into a “discursive symbol.” In this process, the deceased is no longer an individual bound by specific temporal, spatial, and behavioral circumstances, but is presented as a representative of a grand narrative of “victimhood” in the face of “systematic violence.” This symbol-making enables generalization and the expansion of accusations from a limited event to the entire governance structure, both domestically and at regional and global levels.

At this stage, engaging with technical details becomes virtually impossible, as any attempt at expert analysis is framed as “justifying repression” or “justifying terrorism.” Collective emotions replace analytical rationality, and the arena shifts from data to emotion.
In this process, media human resources that have been deliberately “credentialed” over a long period by hostile currents act as intermediary arms of the operation and directly or indirectly serve the advancement of the project.

3. Narrative networking and the production of social illusion after initial narrative consolidation: In addition to the media arms of American-Western and Zionist intelligence and security apparatuses, a synergistic network of hostile Persian-language media outlets, online activists, influencers, and automated accounts plays the role of reproducing and amplifying the narrative. Continuous repetition of the message, in different formats and languages, leads to the formation of a social illusion—a condition in which the audience believes that “everyone is saying the same thing.”
In this environment, alternative narratives or data-based silence are either eliminated or removed from the field through labels such as “whitewashing,” “affiliated,” or “security-linked.” Thus, the arena of dialogue is transformed into a field of psychological pressure driven by the enemy’s narrative line.

4. Chaining incidents and engineering crisis escalation to sustain project credibility: “Incident chaining” is employed as one of the most effective tactics for neutralizing official institutions and marginalizing objective reality. In this model, the initial incident is deliberately removed from its status as an isolated event and, through subsequent incident-making, redefined as part of an escalating narrative chain—a chain that, through the selective linkage of simultaneous or even unrelated events, produces a crisis-centered grand narrative.
The primary objective of this technique is not only to disrupt decision-making within responsible intelligence, security, and judicial institutions, but also to alter the scale of audience perception: an incident that is manageable at a technical and legal level is elevated, at the perceptual level, into a sign of a “continuous structural crisis.” Consequently, public attention is diverted away from causal, data-driven, and expert examination of the initial incident toward emotional demands and immediate reactions.
Operationally, incident chaining erodes the functioning of official institutions on two levels: first, by imposing a state of “artificial multi-crisis,” it weakens the capacity for phased and precise responses; second, every institutional response is judged not as the fulfillment of a defined legal responsibility, but as denial or social repression, and as part of a larger, undefined crisis.
Thus, even technically correct actions appear insufficient, delayed, or denialist. In the logic of cognitive warfare, incident chaining is a key tool for escalating perceptual tension and creating deadlock in lawful decision-making.

5. Transferring the narrative from the media level to diplomacy and international institutions: One of the final stages in transforming an incident into a strategic crisis is the gradual transfer of the narrative from the media sphere and public opinion into diplomatic consultations and formal international mechanisms. At this stage, the consolidated narrative of the incident is reproduced as a basis for political action in interactions with aligned governments and, through transnational political groups and international institutions—especially so-called human rights mechanisms—becomes a “shared agenda.”
These institutions, many of which have been capacity-built over a long period for such functions, play the role of converting media narratives into official demands, institutional reports, and legal-political pressure.
Thus, a limited incident, after passing through the filters of narrative construction and incident chaining, enters the cycle of international decision-making and becomes a tool for multilayered pressure against the target country.A noteworthy point at this stage is the breadth of Western countries involved in this process and the structural overlap of their leaders’ political interests—leaders whose paths to gaining and maintaining power, in many cases, cannot be explained without the support of American and Zionist lobbying networks. This alignment of interests allows the desired narrative to be reflected at diplomatic and institutional levels as a coordinated, performative consensus, without the need for genuine agreement.
As a result, crisis-manufacturing transcends the level of public opinion and becomes a sustained instrument in pressure-oriented foreign policy against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Strategic Conclusion

The manufactured killing project should be regarded as a durable tool in the hybrid-warfare toolbox of Western-Zionist adversaries against Iran—a tool that, with minimal material cost, produces maximum perceptual impact in reinforcing Iranophobia at domestic, regional, and international levels.
One of the strategic advantages of this project for hostile networks is that even in cases of tactical failure, a minimum level of “perceptual residue” remains in public opinion—a residue that, in later stages, is exploited as a semantic anchor and mental presupposition to activate and facilitate future projects. From the perspective of cognitive warfare, each project in this narrative and cognitive war possesses an accumulative effect.
Effective confrontation with this project requires moving beyond purely defensive reactions and entering the level of “active perceptual action”—an approach that includes rapid responses based on trust-building data, phased transparency, documented narrative construction, and redefining the arena from emotion to analytical rationality. Without such an approach, the repetition of this scenario will not be a possibility, but an operational certainty.

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The Technical Framing of the “Manufactured Killing” Project and Its Mechanisms

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