To understand why some Iraqis today defend the Islamic Republic of Iran with a fervor that borders on devotion, one must return to the 1980s—specifically to the eight brutal years of the Iran–Iraq War. The answer begins there, in the trenches, before it is distorted by the post‑2003 political order that built what I call “the fabricated Iraq,” where nationalism was redefined along sectarian lines rather than civic ones.

If one were to take the most zealous Iraqi defender of the Iranian regime today—someone who speaks in the language of “we and they are one”—and trace the history of his father, grandfather, uncle, or brother during the Iran–Iraq War, one would likely find a man who fought bravely against Iran’s revolutionary project. Many of the families whose sons now mourn Qassem Soleimani or Ali Khamenei on social media lost relatives fighting the very system they now glorify.

How does a legacy shift so dramatically—from a grandfather who died resisting Khomeini’s expansionist slogan “The road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala,” to a grandson who weeps over the death of the men who built that project?

Is this a belated admission of the success of Iran’s sectarian strategy in crushing Iraqi nationalism? Or is it simply the natural outcome of the political and social illiteracy that has dominated Iraq since 2003, producing citizens who defend Iran’s theocracy even when they are its victims?

Part of the answer lies in the structure of Iraqi society, as described by the sociologist Ali al‑Wardi: a personality split between tribal conservatism and urban modernity, a tendency toward superficial religiosity, and a readiness to dissolve into collective emotion whenever sectarian or tribal rhetoric is invoked. But al‑Wardi alone cannot explain today’s phenomenon. For that, we must also turn to Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, written more than a century ago yet eerily applicable to Iraq today.

READ: A regional union or a union of isolation between Iraq and Iran?

Crowds, Le Bon argues, do not seek truth; they seek illusions that give them a sense of belonging and power. “The energy of the rabble magnifies within the crowd,” he writes, and this energy drags the media along with it, sanctifying the behaviour of the mob. This is precisely how Iraqi media outlets today elevate corrupt officials and sectarian clerics to the status of saints—simply because they chant the right slogans at the right moment.

As B. Edelman notes in his introduction to The Crowd, politics has replaced religion but has borrowed its psychological structure. Politics has become a secular faith, and like all faiths, it enslaves people to their own imagined identities. In Iraq, one can easily replace “religion” with “sect”: the sect has become meaning, refuge, justification, and moral cover for every contradiction.

Yet even this psychological–social explanation is insufficient.

To understand why Iraqis defend Khamenei, one must examine Iran’s own strategy—not as a “revolution to be exported,” but as a security‑driven state project that uses sectarian identity as an instrument of regional power.

To understand why Iraqis defend Khamenei, one must examine Iran’s own strategy—not as a “revolution to be exported,” but as a security‑driven state project that uses sectarian identity as an instrument of regional power.

Vali Nasr—an Iranian‑born, Shi’a‑raised, American‑trained scholar—offers a crucial key in his work on Iran’s grand strategy. Iran, he argues, is no longer interested in exporting revolution in the classical sense. Instead, it seeks to build a “shared vision” of a Shi’a world united in opposition to American hegemony. This vision does not require convincing Iraqis that they are Iranian; it only requires convincing them that they are “threatened Shi’a,” and that Tehran is the ultimate guarantor of their identity and safety.

For Nasr, the Iran–Iraq War was the defining moment of modern Iranian statehood. It was not merely a border conflict but a foundational laboratory for the ideology of “Sacred Defence,” which reshaped the Iranian state from within. The institutions that planned and fought that war—under the banner “The road to Jerusalem begins in Karbala”—became the backbone of the regime: the IRGC, the Basij, the ideological mobilization networks, and later the transnational militias.

From this emerged a shift: “Sacred Defence” evolved from an internal narrative into an external network of influence—alliances and militias through which Iran projects power, challenges the regional order, and constructs what became known as the “Shi’a Crescent,” stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean. This crescent was not built on exporting revolution, but on securing a Shi’a sphere of influence tied to a single center.

Within this framework, the Iraqi who defends Khamenei today is not merely “misled” or “ignorant.” He is the product of three overlapping layers:

The dismantling of Iraqi nationalism after 2003 through a sectarian quota system that made loyalty to sect and party stronger than loyalty to the state. The Shi’a parties that rose to power after the U.S. invasion openly embraced Tehran as the source of legitimacy and protection.

The dismantling of Iraqi nationalism after 2003 through a sectarian quota system that made loyalty to sect and party stronger than loyalty to the state. The Shi’a parties that rose to power after the U.S. invasion openly embraced Tehran as the source of legitimacy and protection.

Second: Iran’s strategic investment in the narrative of Shi’a victimhood, linking it to the “Sacred Defence” against Saddam first, and later to the fight against ISIS. The Popular Mobilization Forces were not presented as Iranian proxies but as heirs to a “culture of resistance” crafted by Tehran since the 1980s.

Third: The psychology of crowds described by Le Bon: once an individual dissolves into the group, he loses the ability to think critically. The Iraqi who suffers from electricity shortages, collapsing services, and the corruption of Iran‑aligned parties can still write elegies for Qassem Soleimani because he does not connect his daily misery to the “martyr commander.” He sees in him a protector from a greater enemy—real or imagined.

READ: Al-Sudani deserves political pity

Nasr reminds us that Iran is not the “mad theocracy” Western discourse often portrays. It is a security state that uses religion as a tool of mobilization. “It is not that the theocracy needs the conflict with the West,” Nasr writes. “It is the conflict with the West that needs the theocracy.” Beneath the ideological veneer lies a state seeking to secure its strategic depth, using sectarian identity as political fuel.

When these elements converge, the question “Why do Iraqis defend Khamenei?” becomes less puzzling and more tragic.

They defend him because Iraqi nationalism has been hollowed out and replaced with a fragile sectarian identity.

Because the sect has been sold to them as their final refuge in a chaotic world, and Iran as its ultimate guardian.

Because partisan and religious media crafted a ready‑made narrative: to stand with Iran is to stand with “the oppressed,” while opposing it is to stand with “the arrogant powers.”

Because crowd psychology has turned politics into a new religion, the sect into a new deity, and the leader into an unquestionable icon.

It is easy to dismiss these Iraqis as ignorant or sectarian, but that would be an evasion. They are the product of a system that, for four decades, has redefined friend and foe, turning “Sacred Defence” from an Iranian slogan into a transnational creed.

It is easy to dismiss these Iraqis as ignorant or sectarian, but that would be an evasion. They are the product of a system that, for four decades, has redefined friend and foe, turning “Sacred Defence” from an Iranian slogan into a transnational creed.

Thus, when an Iraqi defends Khamenei—father or son—he is not defending a neighbouring regime. He is defending a distorted image of himself, shaped by sect, party, pulpit, militia, and media. He is defending an illusion sold to him as his final identity, even if that illusion is the very force that confiscated his country, destroyed his state, and squandered the blood of those who once fought on the opposite front.

The bitter irony is that many of these defenders, if they looked at the photographs of their fathers and grandfathers in the trenches of the first war, would see in their eyes a simple definition of Iraqi nationalism—one that required neither a Supreme Leader, nor a Shi’a Crescent, nor a “Resistance Axis.” But history does not speak on its own. Those who speak today are the ones who rewrote the narrative, turning Khamenei into a “supreme reference” even in the imagination of those who have never read a single line of his writings.

This, and only this, explains why some Iraqis defend Khamenei’s regime: because they live in an Iraq whose memory has been rewritten and whose consciousness has been reshaped, until defending another state appears, in their eyes, as a defense of themselves—not as a soft occupation of their homeland.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

© Middle East Monitor