Iran just started training women for combat as its war with the West drags on

And the numbers around this campaign are messy. Iran's government first said more than 31 million people had registered. Then it revised that to around 33 million. But activists went through the campaign website's own source code. They found fewer than four million valid registrations. Nobody has closed that gap. Both numbers are still floating around.

On 18 September, Janfada held a mass rally in Tehran. It marched from Imam Hossein Square to Enghelab Square. Iran's government says 313,000 people showed up. That figure hasn't been checked independently. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran's President, was there.

So what's really going on here? Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, says Janfada looks like an attempt to rebrand the Basij. That's the militia that became known for violently cracking down on protesters inside Iran.

Sasan Zare, who speaks for the Janfada campaign, has not addressed the gap between the registered numbers and the checked numbers.

And there's an economic backdrop to all of this. The United States still has a naval blockade on Iran's southern ports. It has tightened sanctions since the war began.

So what don't we know? Whether this training is meant to put women into combat. Or whether it's civil defence — first aid, survival, emergency response — wrapped in the language of resistance.

IranWire reported one more thing, though Zufron could only find it on that one site. Somayeh Naserian, who runs the Women's Basij in Tehran Province, is said to have described the goal as producing what she called the model woman of the Islamic Revolution — someone who combines modesty and family duties with a role on what she called the battlefield of defence, service and resistance. IranWire also said a drill involving 110,000 women was staged in Tehran Province. That could not be confirmed anywhere else either.

We don't know how many women have finished training so far. We don't know how fast this rolls out to other provinces. We don't know if Iran even has enough weapons and instructors to scale this up. The IRGC and Basij say expansion is coming.

Seven months into a war that hasn't ended, Iran isn't just saying it has mass mobilisation anymore. It has photographs of women holding rifles and anti-tank weapons, at a purpose-built training centre in the middle of Tehran. Nobody outside Iran can say how many women that really means. Or what they're actually being trained for.