Iran turns Tehran's streets into a propaganda battlefield as war with US and Israel escalates

A billboard the size of a building facade looms over Valiasr Avenue, one of Tehran's busiest thoroughfares. Donald Trump's mouth is sewn shut with a blue veil shaped like the Strait of Hormuz. Beside him, a slogan in Persian and English reads: "At the breaking point." The poster went up on 2 May 2026, when the war with the United States and Israel was in full swing and negotiations over the strategic waterway had stalled.

The image was no accident. Since the conflict began, the Iranian regime has blanketed the capital with monumental posters designed for two audiences: the citizens who pass them daily and the foreign adversaries meant to see them shared across global media. Other billboards show Iranian drones shattering the Star of David, protesters chanting "Death to America", and a genealogical banner linking the revolution's founder Ruhollah Khomeini, the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, killed in the war's opening strikes on 28 February, and his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei.

A tradition industrialised

Using walls for political expression dates back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but its roots run deeper. Anthropologist Sepideh Parsapajouh of the French National Centre for Scientific Research traces the practice to pardeh-khâni, a centuries-old tradition where storytellers narrated epics before massive painted canvases. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980, 1988), murals were often personal, families of the fallen commissioned portraits of their sons as gifts for grieving mothers.

That emotional dimension has given way to a centralised production line. The "House of Islamic Revolution Designers", a semi-governmental arts body, now creates designs installed by the Islamic Development Organisation and Tehran Municipality's Beautification Bureau. Hand-painted murals have been replaced by giant printed banners that can be swapped in hours, allowing the state to adapt its messaging in step with battlefield developments.

Cinema, AI and the Argonath

Artificial intelligence has accelerated rendering and elevated visual sophistication. Compositions now borrow the grammar of blockbuster movie posters and high-end advertising. One billboard at Fatemi Square, highlighted by the Franco-German channel Arte, depicts two colossal statues flanking a narrow waterway, an unmistakable echo of the Argonath, the "Gates of Kings" from The Lord of the Rings. The left statue represents Alireza Tangsiri, the Revolutionary Guard Navy commander killed by an Israeli strike on 26 March 2026; the right honours Rais Ali Delvari, a nationalist hero who resisted British forces in 1915. Their outstretched arms signal a blockade of aircraft carriers and warships.

Such depictions effectively immortalise political figures by casting them as heroes.

Parsapajouh explains the logic: martyrdom transforms a dead soldier, politician or scientist into a permanent character in a national story still being written. Portraits of Qassem Soleimani, killed in a US strike in 2020, appear alongside recently fallen Revolutionary Guard commanders, creating a visual continuum from the Iran-Iraq War to the present conflict.

Geography as messaging

Placement is deliberate. Anti-imperialist murals cluster near the former US embassy. At Palestine Square, slogans address Israel directly, some translated into Hebrew. Valiasr Square hosts the most monumental posters; Revolution Square remains the regime's primary channel for speaking to its own citizens. Yet omnipresence does not equal endorsement. "Most Tehran residents have lived with these images for decades," Parsapajouh notes. "They are part of the urban landscape. Most passersby barely pay attention."

In the gaps between state-controlled walls, quieter resistance persists: graffiti, subversive reworkings, acts of erasure. Fleeting and often quickly removed, they are nevertheless photographed and shared online, a reminder that the city remains, in the anthropologist's words, "a space for dialogue".