What Would a Ground Invasion of Iran Look Like?

NEWYORKER-April 7th2026

By Sudarsan Raghavan

An A.I. video recently released by supporters of the Iranian government begins with a robed Shiite Muslim warrior approaching the White House on a stormy night, clutching an ornate split-bladed sword. In the next scene, the weapon slides across President Donald Trump’s cheek. Generated images depict present-day Iranian soldiers defending oil facilities under attack and capturing a U.S. aircraft carrier. Another group pays respects to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading religious figure for millions of Shiites around the world, before launching what appears to be a suicide mission against enemies in Humvees. Then other soldiers attack oil tankers from speedboats as ballistic missiles launch out of a gold-domed mosque, and explosives-laden drones target Dubai. “You can’t kill people who are ready to die for their cause,” the narrator says in English, addressing the U.S. “The Shia are prepared to be martyrs in the cause of their faith. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran that they are defending—not just their land, not just their culture, not just their history, but their faith.”

As the Trump Administration prepares for a possible ground invasion of Iran, the Iranian regime and its loyalists are waging a propaganda war, using motifs of religion, self-sacrifice, and glory, through dozens of videos like this one that are circulating on social media. Many troll Trump and are designed to motivate Shiite Muslims in Iran and around the world. Others are in English and attempt to influence global public opinion, including in the United States, where the war is increasingly unpopular among most Americans. While these A.I. memes are built for dissemination on the modern internet, the reliance on religious iconography and references to martyrdom originate from a different era: the last time Iran was invaded by a foreign power. In the nineteen-eighties, the country fought a brutal eight-year war against Iraq, whose government was backed by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and much of the Arab world. The lessons learned from that conflict still guide the regime and its powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more than four decades later. The Iran-Iraq War “is a vast reservoir of resilience memory from which to draw on,” Hussein Banai, an Iran expert and professor of international studies at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Iran saw “that it could stand up to the United States, but also to other countries that are backed by American power. The narrative of that war is really what’s driven a sense of purpose, especially for the Revolutionary Guard.”

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