Amid jokes of ‘cardboard ayatollah’, how long can Iran continue to project an image of resilience?

Summary

• Iran restricted internet access, monopolising information and limiting external awareness of the war's impact and damage inside the country.
• A handful of brief video clips generated by intrepid Iranian citizens did make it through the electronic censorship wall, but none provided a coherent picture.
• Iran's gamble on the new leader's public absence aims to project an image of mysterious power, but risks being seen as weakness domestically.

LONDON – From the moment Iran was attacked in the early hours of Feb 28, its government knew that the battle for the information space and its ability to shape the propaganda narrative of the conflict would be just as important as the country’s military capabilities to oppose the US-Israeli offensive.

In putting forward their message of defiance, the Iranian authorities benefited from their total control over the domestic information space.

Access to the internet has been restricted in Iran since the start of 2026, when major anti-government riots erupted. This means not only that the Iranian state has a monopoly on the information space, but also that few people outside Iran could form an opinion about what is happening inside the country, or how serious the damage inflicted by US and Israeli air and missile bombardments really is.

“This is one of the most restrictive information environments that I’ve seen,” said Mr Eliot Higgins, the founder of open-source research group Bellingcat, in interviews with the British media.

A handful of brief video clips generated by intrepid Iranian citizens did make it through the electronic censorship wall.

But none provided a coherent picture, and most were aired on media outlets that specialise in broadcasting to the country, such as the BBC’s Persian Service or on Iran International, a Persian-language satellite television channel based in London and supporting the opposition to Iran’s clerical regime.

The Iranian authorities are also helped by the relative simplicity of the public messages they need to push.

Since it is obvious that the war is unpopular in both the US and elsewhere in the world, all the Iranian government has to do is amplify the claim that the bombing merely kills innocent civilians.

Also, since it is equally clear that the main purpose of this war is to overthrow Iran’s clerical regime, all that the leaders in Tehran have to do is remain standing.

The first objective – that of claiming that the US offensive is killing ordinary civilians – was achieved in the first hours of the war when a girls’ primary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab was hit by what most experts now largely agree was a US Tomahawk missile, killing 168 people, mostly children.

The school operated in a building previously used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and was near a Guards barracks, so the US could have had a reasonable case in explaining the attack as a regrettable error.

Instead, President Donald Trump’s bizarre claims that the Iranians inflicted the attack on themselves by getting hold of a US-made Tomahawk missile transformed a tragedy into a propaganda boon for the Iranian regime.

An aerial view of rows of graves prepared for the killed schoolgirls – circulated by a government-controlled press agency – is by now the most iconic image of the conflict.

Image of regime cohesion

Projecting a business-as-usual image by claiming that the Islamic Republic’s regime remains standing was also relatively easy.

It took the Iranian authorities more than 24 hours to admit that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, was killed in the US-Israeli strikes.

And to this day, we still do not know how many of Iran’s other leaders were also killed. The fate of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains shrouded in mystery, and the full list of Iran’s top military commanders who were killed is yet to be published.

But the authorities were quick to claim that “the Islamic Republic’s legal framework ensures zero power vacuum, with clear constitutional provisions activated immediately to maintain the nation’s revolutionary trajectory and resistance front cohesion”, as the official media put it.

What went unnoticed was that – judging by a careful analysis of the released photographs – the first meeting of the transitional leadership appears to have taken place in a hospital, and that the subsequent meetings of top ministers were held in the city of Mashad near the border with Afghanistan and around 1,000km away from the Iranian capital. All that mattered for global audiences was that Iran’s clerical regime continues to function.

Iran’s rulers cleverly branded the current conflict as the “Ramadan War”, thereby giving it a religious character. And they mounted public rallies which, unusually, were attended by Iran’s leadership, supposedly walking freely among ordinary people.

Many of the aerial pictures of the rallies were taken with wide lenses, giving an impression of endless crowds, while the videos of Iranian leaders walking in the streets were tightly cropped so that the bodyguards accompanying politicians were out of the picture frame. Still, the image of regime cohesion and societal calm was accepted worldwide.

AI-generated visuals

Meanwhile, AI-generated imagery and videos from Iran-affiliated outlets circulate “satellite images” of successful strikes on US facilities, some including World War II footage of US ships being hit by Japanese aircraft.

There are plenty of AI-generated videos of Ayatollah Khamenei supposedly embracing his young granddaughter, who is depicted as a manga-style “chibi” – or a small child – with big sparkling eyes and blonde hair, as the US bombs rained upon them.

Yet Iran’s biggest propaganda gamble is only now unfolding: That of claiming that Mr Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader and son of the late leader, is alive, well and in complete control of the nation.

A week after he assumed power, however, he is nowhere to be seen. All the pictures of him currently available are doctored from old photographs. Nobody knows what he looks like today, or what his voice sounds like.

It is possible that he was wounded in the US-Israeli attacks and is therefore not in a presentable condition.

Or it may be that he is just a figurehead for the IRGC – the military force that reports to Iran’s supreme leader – who is now a real power broker.

Either way, the authorities hope that Mr Mojtaba Khamenei’s absence will be treated by Iranians as a sign of a mysterious power, thereby enhancing the regime’s credibility.

But if the new supreme leader continues to remain elusive, Iranians are just as likely to see this as a sign of weakness. There are already plenty of jokes about the “cardboard ayatollah”, seen only on billboards, but not in real life.

So, while the Iranian government may have succeeded in projecting an image of resilience to the outside world, its real information battle with the people of Iran is only beginning.