Weaponising culture in service of war: How Iran used pro-regime propaganda films to justify military intervention in Syria

It begins like something straight out of a Hollywood thriller.

Younes and Ali Rostami, an Iranian father and son, are pilots on a humanitarian mission in Syria. Ali is preparing to return to his pregnant wife in Iran but decides to accompany his father on one final flight — a dangerous journey to Palmyra, where they must rescue a Syrian Ilyushin cargo plane, stranded with civilians and soldiers under siege by the Islamic State (IS) militants.

The mission takes a dark turn when the aircraft is hijacked midair in an elaborate scheme by some IS prisoners onboard. Women and children are released, but the militants force the Rostamis and male passengers to Palmyra.

A debate ensues between Ali and his father as the militants declare their ultimate goal is to occupy Iran and annihilate Shia Muslims. Ali is coerced into piloting the plane in a 9/11-style attack on Damascus — ironically echoing the imagery of the US-led War on Terror, despite Iran’s deep-seated enmity with the United States.

When Ali uncovers the plot, he overpowers a militant, frees the captives, and, strapped in a suicide vest, detonates the plane before it reaches its target, the shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab, a revered Shia site. Children are seen playing beneath a peaceful sky as the wreckage rains down.

This is Damascus Time, a 2018 film by Ebrahim Hatamikia, one of Iran's most celebrated regime-aligned filmmakers.

Today, many in Syria and across the region are celebrating the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime and Iran's expulsion from Syria. But not long ago, Iran’s sprawling cultural apparatus went to great lengths to justify the regime’s military intervention in Syria.

The film received effusive praise from Iranian officials, including Qassem Soleimani, the late commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) elite Quds Force, who commended Ebrahim for what he called a "realistic documentary."

Qassem — killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in January 2020 — oversaw Iran’s intervention in Syria and its wider regional ambitions. He played a critical role in managing Tehran's sprawling network of militias and advisors operating in Syrian territory.

Iran's deus ex machina image

Damascus Time was just one entry in a large canon of pro-regime propaganda films, glorifying Iran's intervention in the civil war as noble, necessary, and humanitarian.

Iran’s war cinema dates back to the early 1980s when the revolutionary government-produced films to rally support for defending the country against Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

Dubbed 'Sacred Defense cinema', these films cast participation in war as an act of faith and martyrdom as the ultimate expression of belief and a path to eternal life.

Amid the heat of the Syrian war, the Iranian regime placed renewed strategic importance on cinema as a tool to legitimise its regional ambitions.

In 2016 alone, a pro-IRGC film festival in Tehran screened at least 65 feature and documentary films centred on the Syrian war, showcasing the scale and coordination of this cultural campaign. The Owj Arts and Media Organization, the cultural arm of the IRGC, was the engine behind many of these productions.

Among its notable works was Hidden Battle, a multi-part documentary directed by Naser Naderi and narrated by Hassan Shemshadi, a former state TV correspondent in Damascus.

Framed as a war investigation, the series portrayed Iran’s involvement as a purely humanitarian mission to combat 'takfiri' terrorists — a pejorative label for Sunni jihadists, often applied indiscriminately to all opponents of Assad.

Takfir refers to the practice of declaring other Muslims — particularly non-Sunni sects such as Shias — or followers of non-Abrahamic religions as infidels.

In Hidden Battle, Hassan begins in a serene Tehran park before shifting to Syria's devastation. He recounts battles around Zaynab’s shrine and sieges of Shia-majority towns like Fu'ah and Kafriya in Idlib, and Nubul and al-Zahra in Aleppo, portraying Iranian and allied forces as liberators. The narrative pins blame on foreign conspiracies — particularly by Turkey and Saudi Arabia — for the chaos.

In both Damascus Time and Hidden Battle, Iran assumes a deus ex machina role reminiscent of Greek drama — portrayed as the saviour of the innocent, the defender of sacred sites, and a steadfast bulwark against IS.

A recurring theme was that if Iran had not fought the 'takfiris' in Syria, it would have had to fight them on its own soil. This rhetorical framing not only aimed to justify the military campaign abroad but to instil fear and urgency at home in support of the intervention in Syria.

This cultural push coincided with the peak of Iran’s regional expansion in the mid to late 2010s. During this period, Iranian officials were open about their ambitions.

In 2018, General Hossein Salami, then deputy commander of the IRGC and its current chief, boasted that Iran now had "bases for the Islamic Revolution from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea," roughly covering the area between Yemen to Syria and Lebanon.

At home, especially among political and cultural elites, this regional imperial posture was often cloaked in spiritual and nationalist rhetoric — framed not only as legitimate but as a source of pride.

In a 2016 interview, renowned musician Sohrab Pournazeri hailed the 'defenders of the shrine' for protecting "the borders of greater Iran," a not-so-subtle nod to Tehran’s extraterritorial ambitions.

Omitted from this narrative was the fact that Iran’s support for Assad helped sustain a war machine responsible for over half a million deaths — most inflicted by Assad’s forces and their Iranian and Russian allies.

In contrast, the Iranian public has grown increasingly disillusioned with the regime's foreign entanglements. During mass protests in recent years, demonstrators have called on the government to stop wasting resources in its adventures abroad and instead address numerous domestic crises and injustices.

Weaponising culture 

The fall of Assad dealt a profound psychological blow to Iran’s leadership. The regime is estimated to have spent between $30 and $50 billion on Syria and lost around a couple of thousand military personnel, as it viewed the Syrian front as a cornerstone of its regional power projection.

To lose it was not merely a military defeat but a symbolic and ideological one. Hence, the fall of the Assad regime has prompted a degree of soul-searching within Iran’s ruling circles.

In a leaked audio file after Assad’s fall, IRGC Brigadier General Behrouz Esbati, the last senior Iranian officer in Syria, tried to soften the loss: "There was no fighting," he claimed. "People rose and toppled a corrupt and wicked system," ignoring the IRGC’s years of support for Assad.

While some accounts sidestepped Assad's atrocities, others admitted that Tehran had concealed the regime’s crimes from the Iranian public.

At the UN Security Council, Iran’s Ambassador Amir Saeed Iravani maintained in early January that Iran's military intervention was aimed at fighting terrorism.

He praised the final-hour withdrawal as "responsible," framing it as a move to protect Syrian lives — despite years of Iranian complicity in brutally suppressing civilian dissent and in the bombardment and siege of cities and towns.

In a sign of shifting tides, Iran’s government and media now refer to the former rebel groups they once labelled 'terrorist-takfiris' as 'the ruling current' — a clear rhetorical pivot aimed at post-war diplomatic recalibration.

Today, with Assad gone and Iran pushed out of Syria, Tehran’s costly investment in blood and treasure has unravelled.

The regime cast itself as a righteous warrior and defender of the faith and the Iranian homeland, propped up by a carefully crafted cultural arsenal.

But instead of preserving the myth, these narratives now stand as stark reminders of how culture was weaponised in service of war — and how that illusion lies buried in Syria’s rubble.

Mohammed A. Salih is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where much of his work focused on the intersection of politics and culture. He has written extensively on Middle Eastern affairs as a journalist, analyst, and scholar

Follow him on X: @MohammedASalih