He asian cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) is one of the rarest and most endangered subspecies of big cats on the planet. There are only 27 individuals left at large, all of them are identified one by one and all of them live in Iran, as explains Bagher Nezaminational director of Asiatic Cheetah Conservation Project. There is no other known population anywhere else on the planet.
In serious danger of extinction, what was already a critical situation has become an emergency since the attacks by the United States and Israel in Iran began in February 2026: the war has paralyzed the only monitoring system that kept this subspecies under control.
What is happening with the Asian cheetah. As account the environmental science and conservation news platform Mongabay, just nine days after forest guards filmed a female with five cubs in the province of North Khorasan, the armed conflict began. Since then, access to the reserves where these animals live has been drastically restricted. The risk is not so much that a bomb falls on a reserve, but rather the lack of vigilance.
The field vehicles used by field scientists and park rangers to guard the small population of Asiatic cheetahs can be mistaken for military targets in their scattered habitat (especially in the desert), so many of Iran’s environmental NGOs have stopped their activity. The country also suffers an internet blackout. This means that monitoring, field studies and field use are no longer operational.
The species. The Asian cheetah diverged from African populations between 32,000 and 67,000 years ago. It is not an African cheetah implanted in Asia, but rather it has its own evolutionary lineage: it is smaller and has lighter fur than the African one and is adapted to arid areas and mountainous terrain.
In fact, its monitoring is more complex not only because there are few of them, but because it lives in inhospitable areas. In any case, both are true Ferraris: they can exceed speeds of 100 km/h in short races. The IUCN has it classified on the Critically Endangered conservation scale since 1996, the highest alert before extinction in the wild.
From an ecological perspective, it serves as a specialized predator on medium-sized ungulates—mainly gazelles—in the desert ecosystems of central Iran. Their disappearance could not be compensated by introducing African cheetahs: the genetic, physiological and behavioral divergence between both groups is too great and hybridization proposals do not have scientific support as a viable short-term solution.
Why is it important. Because it is not a rare subspecies of a known felid, but rather it has a genetically differentiated lineage and is native to Asia. It has more than 30,000 years of history independent of African populations and its disappearance is not compensated by introducing African cheetahs. Furthermore, it fulfills its function there: it is a specialized predator on medium-sized ungulates in the arid ecosystems of central Iran, thus maintaining the balance of gazelle populations. In short: it has its place in the food chain of the desert ecosystem in the interior of the country.
The situation of the Asian cheetah is also a direct indicator of the state of biodiversity conservation at war, as pointed out this article in People and Nature: its consequences are suffered decades after the conflict and sometimes, they are simply irreversible. Iran is home to exceptional biological diversity: Persian leopard, brown bear (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), gray wolf (Canis lupus), among others. The collapse of the cheetah conservation system irremediably affects the rest.
Context. Since 1959, the Asiatic cheetah has had legal protection in Iran. In the following decades its population was stabilized, but the Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s they were wasted years: Lax law enforcement wreaked havoc in the form of zero patrolling, destruction and fragmentation of their habitat, uncontrolled hunting, and decline in prey. In January 2022, Hassan Akbari, deputy minister of natural environment and biodiversity at Iran’s Department of Environment, declared that the Asiatic cheetah population had plummeted to just 12, down from an estimated 100 in 2010. In August 2025, the Tehran Times reported that only 20 copies remained.
Monitoring them is very complicated per sebut there are also circumstances that work against it. For example, the controversial use of camera traps: in 2018 several people from Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation accused of using camera traps for espionage. One person died in prison and the rest were pardoned in 2024. This case paralyzed international collaboration for years. In addition, Western sanctions have also systematically prevented the arrival of financing, essential for adequate monitoring.
Asiatic cheetah dies. The main cause of death for Asian cheetahs is not poaching or predators, but the road. More than 52% of documented deaths They are due to accidents on roads that cross or border key habitats and cheetahs cross them without fear and repeatedly following their prey, such as Abbasabad-Mashhad and Mehriz-Anar.
There are a couple of especially notorious cases of females run over, pregnant or with their young, in recent years: Meyami and Helia. Since the beginning of the conflict, these roads now also transport military material and people for evacuation, which increases traffic. With 27 individuals registered, there is no longer room for errors or unsupervised times: genetic analysis published in Conservation Genetics details that genetic diversity is critically low and inbreeding poses an additional risk to the viability of the subspecies.
What can be done. Wild Tomorrow analyzes this problem in detail, advising to ignore social media campaigns that call for “emergency evacuations” without rigor: moving big wild cats across militarized borders is medically risky and informal channels can prove to be a route for illegal trafficking. Furthermore, we have already seen that proposing clandestine communications can expose those who protect the cheetah to accusations of espionage.
What does have a real effect is supporting the Iranian Cheetah Society, the organization with the greatest field knowledge of this population. Likewise, at the international level there are organizations with real capacity to act as pantherathe Cheetah Conservation Fund or the IUCN Cat Specialist Group. It is necessary to know what they can do in that high-risk environment and what they need. Of course, the future looks bleak even if the war ended tomorrow: with 27 individuals and no margin, the risk in the next decade is real. Jamshid Parchizadeh, a researcher at Michigan State University and with extensive experience in Iranian wildlife, sums it up: “environmental programs are rarely considered a priority after a conflict, especially in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.”
In Xataka | Behind oil, the US had a much more mundane reason for attacking Iran: pistachios
Cover | موسی مزینانیان via Wikimedia and Moslem Daneshzadeh
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings