World

A Viral Video of a Chained Woman in China and the Secret Campaign to Save Her

Published

12 months ago

March 7, 2025

A Viral Video of a Chained Woman in China and the Secret Campaign to Save Her

The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.

But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.

She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.

The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.

Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.

Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.

The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.

And yet, it did.

To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.

The clampdown shows how rattled the authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society. Though the party says it supports gender equality, under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has described motherhood as a patriotic duty, jailed women’s rights activists and censored calls for tougher laws to protect women from mistreatment.

Yet even as the crackdown forced women to hide their anger, it did not extinguish it. In secret, a new generation of activists has emerged, more determined than ever to continue fighting.

Who Is the Chained Woman?

At first sight, Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu Province, half empty, most residents long departed to look for better lives elsewhere.

But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house, with faded maroon double doors, appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera on a nearby pole pointed directly at the entrance.

This was the street where the chained woman had lived.

Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.

After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other — offering different dates for when she was first chained, for example, or alternately suggesting that she had been homeless or gotten lost before arriving in Dongji. Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.

According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.

As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.

Trafficking women has been a big business in China for decades. A longstanding cultural preference for boys, exacerbated by the one-child policy, created a surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom could not find wives. Poor, rural men in eastern China began buying women from the country’s even poorer western regions.

Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji — more than 2,000 miles from her hometown — who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.

Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Mr. Dong and villagers. When she first arrived in Dongji, she had been able to take care of herself; by the time she was found, she had trouble communicating.

The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Mr. Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)

“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Mr. Dong told one blogger, before the video of the shack emerged.

Mr. Dong’s social media posts portray him as a doting father

Privately, though, Mr. Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since 2017, the government said. He also did not take her to the hospital when she was sick.

Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Mr. Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.

The official story ended there.

Step 1: Hide the Victim

As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.

Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors. Then they escorted us to the train station.

The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger. Relatives of people killed in plane crashes, coronavirus patients and survivors of domestic violence have all been shuffled out of sight, threatened or detained.

Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.

We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Dr. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone.

Other locals we asked had no information either. But several people in neighboring villages said it was common knowledge that many women in the area, including in their own villages, had been bought from southwestern China. Some called it sad; others were matter-of-fact.

Still, it was clear that talking about such trafficking could be risky.

As we got closer to Dongji, a black Volkswagen began tailing us. Then, at least eight villagers surrounded us, calling us race traitors (we are both of Chinese heritage) and at times pushing my colleague. One said that if we had been men, they would have beaten us.

They eventually escorted us back to the main road after we called the police. Along the way, one man said it was in our own interest to be more cautious.

“If you two were taken to the market and sold,” he said, “then what would you do?”

Step 2: Silence Discussion

After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the controls were tightest in Dongji. But the government sprang into action across the country to suppress the debate that followed.

Legal scholars observed that the penalty for buying a trafficked woman — three years’ imprisonment — was less than that for selling an endangered bird. Others noted that judges have denied divorce applications from women known to have been abused or trafficked, and that the government has repeatedly ignored calls to criminalize marital rape.

To halt such conversations, the police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled 200 miles to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.

After she returned home, police officers knocked on her door, asking her why she had gone. They visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.

They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui Province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.

Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei Province, about 600 miles from Dongji, said in an interview that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case (he refused, but said he never received the information).

Bookstores that put up displays recommending feminist reading were forced to remove them. Numerous online articles about the woman were censored; China Digital Times, a censorship tracker, archived at least 100 of them, though there were many more.

The campaign even extended overseas. A woman living abroad said in an interview that the police called her parents in China after she posted photos of herself in chains online.

Ms. He, the veteran activist, realized that the government was more worried about feminism than she had thought. She had been detained previously for other activism, but this monthslong pressure “far surpassed that,” she said.

Step 3: Detain Those Who Persist

To avoid arrest, Ms. He stopped posting about the case. She eventually left China for Thailand.

Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.

Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.

“Your sisters are coming,” Wuyi posted.

They were barred from entering the hospital or the village, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo. So they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.

They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.

Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.

“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.

About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.

The Resistance Goes Into Hiding

After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent.

But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground.

It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name. We met at her home, where she asked that I not bring my cellphone to avoid surveillance. Soft-spoken but assured, she recounted how police scrutiny forced her to embrace new tactics.

When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.

Within days, the police tracked down and interrogated participants. At around the same time, anonymous articles appeared online that doxxed some members of the group and labeled them “extreme feminists.” The group disbanded.

But the intimidation only made Monica angrier.

So a few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.

For weeks, they studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a U.N. committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.

They later submitted similar reports to two other U.N. committees. A member of one of the committees, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the reports were crucial sources of independent information from China. That person had not heard of the chained woman before.

In May 2023, U.N. officials raised the chained woman’s story during a public meeting with Chinese government representatives. The government said it had imprisoned Mr. Dong and that the woman was being cared for. Still, Monica felt proud — and emboldened: “You feel that you can still do some risky things.”

“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” she said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”

Others have tried to subtly keep the chained woman’s legacy alive in other ways. An all-female band released a song called “So Who Has My Key?” An artist spent 365 days wearing a chain around her neck. A writer published a thinly disguised retelling of Snow White.

In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. The authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.

Social media users erupted, accusing the government of glossing over trafficking again.

Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

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World

Sánchez defies Trump in political gamble as Madrid say no to war

Published

52 minutes ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

Sánchez defies Trump in political gamble as Madrid say no to war

Pedro Sánchez knows exactly what he is doing.

By defying Donald Trump and doubling down on his bras de fer with the US president, the Spanish prime minister consolidates a two-fold strategy.

On the one hand, he seeks to mobilize his progressive electorate domestically, resuscitating a “no to war” movement which resonated strongly with Spanish voters during the US-led war against Iraq in 2003. Sánchez is also hoping for a moment akin to that of Dominique de Villepin: a Cassandra warning against an unjustified war that will bring disastrous consequences.

Only now it’s Iran.

In doing so, he aims to consolidate his image as one of the last strongly progressive, socialist leaders in a global political environment shifting rightward under the influence of MAGA-aligned politics, at a time when left-wing parties across Europe are losing electoral ground and struggling to project a unified international voice.

His strategy, while bold, is also risky as it could leave Spain diplomatically isolated from the European consensus and trigger a trade war that could impact Spanish companies in the US. It also risks inflaming tensions within NATO where Madrid has pursued a somewhat independent strategic line. Intelligence-sharing is also crucial and may be compromised with national security ramifications if the US decides to weaponise it.

Still, far from looking for a ramp-off, Sánchez is double down on his bet.

“In 2003, a few irresponsible leaders dragged us into an illegal war into an illegal war in the Middle East that brought nothing but insecurity and pain,” Sánchez said Wednesday.

“No to violations of international law. No to the illusion that we can solve the world’s problems with bombs. No to repeating the mistakes of the past. No to war.”

A clash choreographed to perfection

His campaign against the US-Israeli intervention in Iran comes after Trump threatened to impose a trade embargo on Spain in response to Madrid’s refusal to allow Washington to use its military bases to strike Iran from its territory.

Spain insisted any operation handled from the two bases it hosts in Rota and Moron should be limited to humanitarian assistance rather than offensive strikes, and that all activities must comply with international law. The move led to the withdrawal of U.S. aircraft from the bases according to radar information.

From the Oval office on Tuesday, Trump referred to Spain as an “unfriendly” and “terrible” ally. As he threatened a trade embargo in response, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz—who was visiting the White House—remained silent, Spain judged that the time had come to confront the world’s most powerful man and began preparing its response.

Sources close to the Spanish government late afternoon began to brief that, if Washington were to unilaterally terminate trade ties, it would have to do “in compliance with international law, EU-USA terms of trade and respecting private companies.”

By 8 p.m. Madrid time, the Prime Minister’s office informed journalists that Sánchez would deliver a “declaración institucional”—a statement typically reserved for solemn occasions—at 9 a.m. the following day. The announcement was made just ahead of the evening news broadcasts.

Little was left to chance, reflecting Sánchez’s carefully managed communications strategy, which is often viewed as both highly effective but also opportunistic.

According to people familiar with the Moncloa palace, as the 17th-century inspired office of the prime minister is known, backtracking was never an option.

Instead, Madrid was clear it needed to respond forcefully, emphasizing Spain’s sovereignty, the consistency of its foreign policy from Ukraine to Gaza and Sánchez’s position as the only European leader standing up to Trump.

The Spanish Prime Minister delivered just that.

‘Our position is best resumed in four words: no to the war,” he said, adding that “23 years ago, another US administration dragged us into war in the Middle East.”

“We were told it would destroy weapons of mass destruction, export democracy and guarantee global security. In hindsight, it was the opposite. It led to a drastic increase of terrorism, a grave migration crisis in the Mediterranean and more expensive energy.”

The political assessment of the Spanish government is that Europeans are tired of appeasing Trump, whether in tariff disputes or defence commitments such as imposing a 5% spending goal with a large chunk dedicated to buying US weapons.

As a result, a candidate who is seen as willing to defend European interests and confront Trump could gain a strong electoral advantage. The Spanish government has not been shy about its policy positions, at the risk of antagonising the real estate magnate since he returned to the White House last year.

Last summer, Madrid refused to adhere to the 5% target suggesting that it would lead to chaotic off-the-shelf purchases of weapons, rather than common European buying, and suggested that NATO performance should be measured on capabilities.

The message is simple: Spain is an ally, but it’s also sovereign.

Echoes of Villepin and the ghost of the Azores

For his latest move, Sánchez took inspiration from two defining moments after the launch of the US operation against Iraq in 2003 under President George W. Bush.

The first was a powerful speech delivered in February that year by former French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin who warned before the UN Security Council—of which France is a permanent member—against what he described as a potentially disastrous invasion.

De Villepin passionately pushed back against the US, disputed military actions and suggested intelligence report did not support American claims of a linkage between al-Qaeda, the Saddam Hussein regime and the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Time proved Villepin right.

The Iraqi war is particularly relevant for the Spanish public opinion because, at the time, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar alongside former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair threw their support behind the Bush administration in its operation.

In the Spanish press, the three leaders were dubbed the “Trío de las Azores,” a name inspired by a photograph taken of them on the Portuguese Atlantic archipelago of the Azores. Spain’s backing of the war sparked a massive protest movement across the country under the slogan “No a la guerra.”

More than 20 years later, Sánchez is reviving it, hoping it will energize his base, increase his international profile and — just as it did for Dominique de Villepin —vindicate his choices.

The Spanish prime minister is facing a difficult re-election campaign, with the next vote scheduled to take place in 2027. Still, Madrid is rife with speculation that he could call for a snap election if he sees a favourable opening and succeeds in rallying his progressive coalition.

But to move up a planned election date, he needs a compelling justification or risk being seen as too cynical to be palatable. Sánchez is perceived by a large part of the Spanish electorate as lacking a moral compass.

The war in the Middle East — and his hard line toward Donald Trump, which the opposition claims risks isolating Spain within the EU, NATO and the broader Western alliance — could provide such a rationale.

The Spanish Prime Minister played that card back in 2023: when he framed a snap election as a referendum on his policies. Although the conservatives secured the largest share of the vote, Spain’s parliamentary system enabled Sánchez to assemble a majority coalition and remain in power.

A clash a long time in the making

In many ways, the rocky relation between the US under Trump and the Spanish government is hardly surprising. The two have clashed on everything from migration policies to societal values, each embracing their role as the other’s political opposite.

For Sánchez — a deeply polarizing figure who denies any wrongdoing in multiple court cases involving members of his family — the international stage offers a political shelter, as is often the case for embattled leaders at home. And he is intentional in cultivating a global profile.

An international conference of left-leaning voices expected to take place in Barcelona next April debating topics from democracy, tech oligarchs and reactionary movements, according to a person familiar with the organizer. The goal is to present a forum that can rival the CPAC, the largest gathering for conversatives, only this time for progressives.

In the meantime, the Spaniards have grown increasingly convinced that more European voices will join them as the war drags on. “Many are afraid of confrontation with the US, but our words reflect what a large camp thinks in Europe,” said a Spanish diplomat.

On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron called Sánchez to express his solidarity in the face of Trump’s trade threats. European Council President Antonio Costa and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen did the same.

Still, his power moves have not gone unnoticed by critics, who argue that Madrid is treading a very fine line by antagonizing the United States for political gain, even as the EU seeks to secure a fair peace deal for Ukraine. With an American security guarantee necessary to ensure Kyiv is not attacked again by Russia, and US input in NATO remaining crucial for European security, such tensions carry significant risks.

“He does this for national politics, and he knows the EU will back him up because solidarity always prevails. But is this really necessary?” asked a diplomat from another EU country.

For Madrid, it’s not just necessary, it’s imperative.

World

The sea is higher than we thought and millions more are at risk, study finds

Published

11 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

The sea is higher than we thought and millions more are at risk, study finds

Climate change’s rising seas may threaten tens of millions more people than scientists and government planners originally thought because of mistaken research assumptions on how high coastal waters already are, a new study said.

Researchers studied hundreds of scientific studies and hazard assessments, calculating that about 90% of them underestimated baseline coastal water heights by an average of 1 foot (30 centimeters), according to Wednesday’s study in the journal Nature. It’s a far more frequent problem in the Global South, the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and less so in Europe and along Atlantic coasts.

The cause is a mismatch between the way sea and land altitudes are measured, said study co-author Philip Minderhoud, a hydrogeology professor at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. And he attributed that to a “methodological blind spot” between the different ways those two things are measured.

Each way measures their own areas properly, he said. But where sea meets land, there’s a lot of factors that often don’t get accounted for when satellites and land-based models are used. Studies that calculate sea level rise impact usually “do not look at the actual measured sea level so they used this zero-meter” figure as a starting point, said lead author Katharina Seeger of the University of Padua in Italy. In some places in the Indo-Pacific, it’s close to 3 feet (1 meter), Minderhoud said.

Dilrukshan Kumara looks at the ocean as he stands by the remains of his family’s home in Iranawila, Sri Lanka, June 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena, File)

One simple way to understand that is that many studies assume sea levels without waves or currents, when the reality at the water’s edge is of oceans constantly roiled by wind, tides, currents, changing temperatures and things like El Niño, said Minderhoud and Seeger.

Adjusting to a more accurate coastal height baseline means that if seas rise by a little more than 3 feet (1 meter) — as some studies suggest will happen by the end of the century — waters could inundate up to 37% more land and threaten 77 million to 132 million more people, the study said.

That would trigger problems in planning and paying for the impacts of a warming world.

People at risk

“You have a lot of people here for whom the risk of extreme flooding is much higher than people thought,’’ said Anders Levermann, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, who wasn’t part of the study. And Southeast Asia, where the study finds the biggest discrepancy, has the most people already threatened by sea level rise, he said.

Minderhoud pointed to island nations in that region as an area where the reality of discrepancy hits home.

Children play on an uprooted tree along a beach in Mele, Vanuatu, July 19, 2025, that was once lined with vegetation, now largely lost to storms, erosion and other environmental pressures. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag, File)

For 17-year-old climate activist Vepaiamele Trief, the projections aren’t abstract. On her island home in the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, the shoreline has visibly retreated within her short lifetime, with beaches eroded, coastal trees uprooted and some homes now barely 3 feet (about 1 meter) from the sea at high tide. On her grandmother’s island of Ambae, a coastal road from the airport to her village has been rerouted inland because of encroaching water. Graves have been submerged and entire ways of life feel under threat.

“These studies, they aren’t just words on a paper. They aren’t just numbers. They’re people’s actual livelihoods,” she said. “Put yourself in the shoes of our coastal communities — their lives are going to be completely overturned because of sea level rise and climate change.”

Paying attention to the starting point

This new study is pretty much about what is the truth on the ground.

Calculations that may be correct for the seas overall or for the land aren’t quite right at that key intersection point of water and land, Seeger and Minderhoud said. It’s especially true in the Pacific.

Gravestones sit submerged in water on Pele Island, Vanuatu, a country heavily affected by rising seas July 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag, File)

“To understand how much higher a piece of land is than the water, you need to know the land elevation and the water elevation. And what this paper says the vast majority of studies have done is to just assume that zero in your land elevation dataset is the level of the water. When in fact, it’s not,” said sea level rise expert Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central. His 2019 study was one of the few the new paper said got it right.

“It’s just the baseline that you start from that people are getting wrong,” said Strauss, who wasn’t part of the research.

Maybe not so bad, some scientists say

Other outside scientists said that Minderhoud and Seeger may be making too much of the problem.

“I think they’re exaggerating the implications for impact studies a bit — the problem is actually well understood, albeit addressed in a way that could probably be improved,” said Gonéri Le Cozannet, a scientist at the French geological survey. Most local planners know their coastal issues and plan accordingly, Rutgers University sea level expert Robert Kopp said.

That’s true in Vietnam in the high-impact area, Minderhoud said. They have an accurate sense of elevation, he said.

The findings come as a new UNESCO report warns of major gaps in understanding how much carbon the ocean absorbs. That report said that models differ by 10% to 20% in estimating the size of that carbon sink, raising questions about the accuracy of global climate projections that rely on them.

The coastline of Efate Island, Vanuatu is visible on July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag, File)

Together, the studies suggest governments may be planning for coastal and climate risks with an incomplete picture of how the ocean is changing.

“When the ocean comes closer, it takes away more than just the land we used to enjoy,” said Thompson Natuoivi, a climate advocate for Save the Children Vanuatu.

“Sea level rise is not just changing our coastline, it’s changing our lives. We are not talking about the future — we’re talking about the right now.”

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

World

Israel hammers Iranian internal security command centers to open door to uprising

Published

12 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

Israel hammers Iranian internal security command centers to open door to uprising

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The Israeli military’s latest wave of airstrikes in Iran dealt a serious blow to the country’s brutal internal security apparatus, opening the door for a potential uprising.

During the strikes, Israel “dropped dozens of munitions on the Basij and internal security command centers that are subject to the Iranian terror regime,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on Wednesday. “The targeted command centers were used by the Iranian regime to maintain control throughout Iran and maintain the regime’s situational assessments.”

Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. has hit nearly 2,000 targets as it carries out a sweeping military campaign aimed at dismantling the regime’s security apparatus and neutralizing threats. Adm. Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command confirmed the number of targets hit in a video message.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia, Iran’s volunteer paramilitary force, were behind the violent crackdown on protesters in January. The bloody crackdown saw regime actors firing on crowds and conducting mass arrests of Iranian protesters. Some had seen the protests as a sign that regime change in Iran was getting nearer, though it did not occur.

Smoke rises from central Tehran following reported U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran’s capital, on March 3, 2026. (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israeli and U.S. officials have hinted at the possibility of regime change in Iran as both countries take aim at Tehran’s military and security sites.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video message announcing the launch of Operation Epic Fury, which Israel calls Operation Rising Lion, that it was time for Iranians “to rid themselves of the yoke of tyranny.” Similarly, President Donald Trump said in a message to the Iranian people on Feb. 28 that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.”

“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations,” Trump said.

Plumes of smoke rise following reported explosions in Tehran on March 3, 2026, after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in joint U.S. and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28, 2026. (Negar/Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)

ISRAELI MINISTER OUTLINES IRAN MISSION GOALS, SAYS IRANIAN PEOPLE NOW HAVE CHANCE TO ‘REGAIN THEIR FREEDOM’

“America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass,” the president added.

Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told The Wall Street Journal that the path to regime change through foreign airstrikes and popular uprising on the ground has “a bet that rests on no clear historical model.” Vaez also warned that the idea “ignores the resilience of entrenched authoritarian systems like the Islamic Republic.”

The IDF said on Monday that Israel had hit headquarters, bases and regional command centers that belonged to the regime’s internal security apparatus.

“These bodies were responsible for, among other things, suppressing protests against the regime through violent measures and civilian arrests,” the IDF said.

A group of men inspects the ruins of a police station struck amid the U.S.–Israeli military campaign in Tehran, Iran, on Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (Vahid Salemi/AP)

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It is unclear who will lead Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the operation. Since then, Israel and the U.S. have made it clear that regime leaders chosen to replace him would be targets. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Wednesday that anyone chosen to replace Khamenei would be considered “a target for elimination” if they continued to threaten Israel, the U.S. and regional allies.

The killing of key leaders might not be enough to cause an uprising, as the regime has a monopoly on weapons in most of Iran, the WSJ reported, adding that Basij militants are still patrolling the streets.

Fox News Digital’s Morgan Phillips and Efrat Lachter contributed to this report.

Rachel Wolf is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital and FOX Business.