What Would a Ground Invasion of Iran Look Like?

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.”

On Sunday, Trump vowed to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if by Tuesday night the regime doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. A defiant Iran replied that it would not open the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flows, unless the U.S. pays for war damages. And it warned that it would retaliate “much more crushingly and extensively.” The morning before the deadline, Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” adding that “we will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. ground forces, including U.S. Special Operations Forces, seaborne marines and élite Army paratroopers, with experience in seizing strategic terrain during rapid-response combat missions, have arrived in the Middle East. Over the weekend, the risks of operating on the ground were laid bare when Iran shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet, and the two airmen in the plane ejected over the southwestern part of Iran. Later, a second, low-flying U.S. warplane, an A-1src Warthog that was part of a mission to rescue the F-15E pilot, was hit multiple times, but its pilot managed to fly out of Iran and eject safely over Kuwaiti airspace before it crashed. A U.S. HH-6srcW Jolly Green II combat helicopter also came under heavy fire; its crew sustained minor injuries but were able to leave Iranian airspace without mishap. While the pilot of the F-15E was rescued shortly after ejecting, the second airman, an Air Force weapons officer, fled into a mountainous region, where he climbed mountain ridges several thousand feet high, despite being injured, and successfully evaded Iranian forces for more than a day. He hid in a rock crevice and activated an emergency beacon to signal his location, setting off a sprawling mission deep inside Iran which involved commandos from SEAL Team Six, hundreds of other military personnel, and a hundred and fifty-five aircraft, including sixty-four fighters, forty-eight refuelling tankers, thirteen rescue aircraft, and four bombers. After the weapons officer was located, two U.S. transport planes that had landed at a remote forward operating base inside Iran to extract the team and the airman experienced mechanical problems, and three other planes had to be dispatched to extract them hours later. Before leaving, the team blew up the immobilized aircraft to prevent sophisticated technology from falling into Iranian hands. At a White House press conference on Monday, Trump acknowledged that the operation was “a risky decision, because we could have ended up with a hundred dead, as opposed to one or two. It’s a hard decision to make, but in the United States military we leave no American behind.”

While no U.S. service members died in the rescue, the chaos of operating inside Iran’s border is just a preview of what a full-scale ground invasion, or even limited incursions, would look like—and the Iran-Iraq War can offer a blueprint. U.S. troops could quickly find themselves fighting a guerrilla conflict against Iranian forces who deploy tactics and strategies developed during Iraq’s invasion and further honed in succeeding regional and internal conflicts. That war’s extreme death toll and the lingering memories of being occupied by a foreign force have established a mind-set that could galvanize more Iranians to support a war against an invading American force, including those who were opposed to the regime before the U.S.-Israel attack. “Those affiliated with the state know that the one thing that united everybody in post-revolutionary moments was the Iraqi invasion of Iran,” Amir Moosavi, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark who specializes in the cultural history of the Middle East, told me. The regime, Moosavi said, uses “this language of resistance to cultivate a culture of remembrance about that conflict,” which was “the first act of resistance that Iran had against the U.S. and its regional allies. It’s an evolving language that is now being used and updated for the current conflict.”

In the propaganda video, the narrator mentions the core Shiite religious figures Ali and Hussein, the first and third Shiite Imams, respectively, as well as the Battle of Karbala, a seventh-century uprising by Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, against a tyrant named Yazid. During the confrontation, Hussein and his followers were massacred, but the imam’s quest for justice became a defining value of Shiite identity, fostering a sense of revolutionary duty to fight oppressors at any cost. Even the split-bladed sword the A.I. warrior carries outside of the White House, known as the sword of Zulfiqar, has religious connotations: it belonged to Imam Ali and symbolizes resistance and martyrdom. Trump, the narrator claims, “has no clue” about the Battle of Karbala or Shiite philosophies or their imprint on the current war. “The Islamic Republic is invincible at this moment,” he declares as the video ends with an apocalyptic scene of missiles raining chaos down on central Tel Aviv.

On September 23, 198src, one day after launching airstrikes on Iran, Iraqi ground forces crossed into Khuzestan, a strategic western province that contained Iran’s largest oil field and a considerable number of Iranian Arabs, a minority in the country. The previous year, the Islamic Revolution had deposed Iran’s Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and installed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an ultraconservative Shiite theocracy. From the very start of the attack by the U.S. and Israel in February, there were striking parallels to Iraq’s invasion. Before Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator, declared war on Iran, he feared that the fledgling theocracy next door would export its hard-line ideology and marshal Iraq’s Shiite majority to topple his Sunni-dominated Baathist regime. Like Trump, he viewed crushing Iran as a great service to the region—in his case, by shielding the Sunni Arab world from Shiite expansionism. Iraq took advantage of the Iranian military’s disarray in the aftermath of the Revolution. It launched air strikes on Iranian airbases, fired hundreds of Scud missiles at Iranian cities, including Tehran, and targeted Iran’s oil-and-energy infrastructure, in moves reminiscent of today’s extensive U.S.-Israeli campaign to degrade the regime’s military capabilities and resilience. The U.S., the Soviet Union, and France would eventually provide intelligence and advanced weaponry to Iraq. Iran’s Air Force and military fought back, but isolated by the world and under U.S. and international sanctions, they had to scramble for spare parts for its warplanes and military equipment. Like Trump, Saddam Hussein expected a quick, decisive victory. He believed that by imposing large numbers of casualties on Iran, including chemical attacks on civilians, he could break the regime’s morale and force it to agree to his demands. He urged Iranians to rise against the government. Instead, they remained loyal to the Ayatollah. Saddam, like Trump, underestimated Iran’s fierce response and its determination to survive at any cost.

Lacking conventional military resources to fight Saddam’s army, Iran turned to asymmetric warfare, fighting back through low-cost methods. Its strategy was clear: to endure and survive, it needed to prolong the war and gradually wear down Iraq and its allies. This meant conducting guerrilla attacks and cobbling together missiles and warplanes to shell Iraqi cities. And when Iraq bombed Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, the regime retaliated, bombing Iraqi oil facilities and later using improvised mines and missiles to target ships carrying Iraqi crude in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran also spied on Iraqi positions with rudimentary precursors to drones, an early use of one of the regime’s most effective weapons in its attempt to blockade the strait. The rhetoric used by the regime was telling: fighting the invaders was not just a matter of national defense but a pre-ordained religious mandate. Iranians called the war the “sacred defense,” or the “imposed war,” and the conflict was framed as a modern-day Battle of Karbala. The religious branding of the war motivated hundreds of thousands of Iranians to join the Basij, or “mobilization” in Farsi, a volunteer militia that is now one of the most powerful paramilitary forces in the country, and made martyrdom an honor.

By December, 198src, these tactics had stalled Iraq’s advance. And by June, 1982, Iran had pushed Iraqi forces back across the border. But the war lasted six more years, much of it in a military stalemate. In 1988, with Iran facing battlefield setbacks, a lack of military resources, and economic ruin, Khomeini was forced to sign a U.N.-brokered ceasefire. As many as six hundred thousand Iranians had died in the conflict. He famously described the decision as “more deadly than drinking from a poisoned chalice.” But the regime survived, and Iran avoided losing any of its territory. It declared a moral and religious victory. This past Sunday, Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based in Washington, D.C., wrote in a post on X that, at that time, “Iran faced existential economic pressure and was offered a concrete diplomatic exit that did not require it to abandon its revolutionary identity. Trump has offered the pressure without a clear exit.”

The relative success of the war elevated the Revolutionary Guard from a small, street-level militia, initially created to protect Khomeini and the other clerics at the forefront of the Islamic Revolution, into the symbolic defenders of the theocracy. “The Iran-Iraq War was what the Great Patriotic War was for the Soviet Union and for Russia,” Michael Connell, an analyst who specializes in the Iranian military at C.N.A., a D.C.-based nonprofit research organization, told me, referring to the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany. “It was a coming of age, really, for the I.R.G.C., and for the regular military in Iran, because so many of the leaders that have shaped those organizations for the past few decades got their start during the war.”

These leaders spent the next four decades preparing for another major invasion, specifically one by the United States. The regime had never portrayed the war with Iraq as a bilateral fight but, rather, as a proxy war led by the U.S. and its Arab allies. I.R.G.C. commanders became Iran’s most powerful generals—many are still leading the war today—and the Iranian military focussed on improving its asymmetric war capabilities and building its own defense industry. That included ballistic missiles, in addition to low-cost mines and drones. To project power and deterrence, the regime also launched a nuclear program and influenced regional wars with a network of proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza. As Iransaw it, “The only existential threat to the Iranians was the U.S., and secondarily Israel,” Connell said. They spent decades studying “how the U.S. operates, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for ways that they could invest resources into things that would deliver more bang for the buck.”

Today, the soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War are still memorialized in town and city squares across the country. Every September, the regime celebrates “Sacred Defense Week” to commemorate the start of the war and honor the dead with military parades. In schools, the war is taught in such a way as to instill the values of resistance and martyrdom in children, as well as a distrust of America and the West.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has said that the U.S. can achieve its objectives in Iran without using ground troops. But Trump has sent mixed signals and has publicly said he likes to keep opponents guessing about his intentions. In either case, the Iranian regime seems to be prepared, militarily and in its messaging. In a social-media post in late March, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote, “How can the US, which can’t even protect its own soldiers at its bases in the region and instead leaves them stashed away in hotels and parks, protect them on our soil?” For decades, the I.R.G.C. and other forces have regularly conducted military exercises and drills to prepare for a ground invasion. Today, Iran has roughly six hundred and ten thousand active-duty soldiers, including a hundred and ninety thousand I.R.G.C. members, and it can draw upon approximately another million Basij fighters. There are reports that the I.R.G.C. is sending reinforcements to Kharg Island, through which ninety per cent of Iran’s oil exports flow, and bolstering its defenses, including planting sea mines to slow down an amphibious landing. Other U.S. targets could potentially include territory in or near the Strait of Hormuz, with the aim of ending Iran’s closure of economically vital shipping lanes, and also sites where Iran has stockpiled its enriched uranium.

In 2srcsrc3, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, American combat troops slipped over remote borders without stiff resistance and struck the military’s nerve center in Baghdad, debilitating Saddam’s command-and-control systems. In Iran, a similar scenario is unlikely. The regime has set up a decentralized “mosaic” defense system with I.R.G.C. and regular Army command posts spread out across the country, replete with their own intelligence capabilities and supplies of missiles, drones, and other advanced weaponry. Lower-level commanders have the authority to conduct certain types of operations without approval from central command, if contact with Tehran is disrupted or lost–an operational guideline stemming from Iran’s observations of how the US attacked Iraq. Multiple Iranian units, including the Basij, could be used to swarm U.S. troops. “Let’s say you were invading the South, it’s not kids from Tehran or some other place that are manning bases,” Afshon Ostovar, the author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East” told me. “It’s all kids from the local neighborhoods. They know the terrain, they know the valleys, they know the caves, they know the roads. That gives them a certain advantage. And Iran has also learned, not just from the Iran-Iraq War, but from the Iraq War during the U.S. occupation, some of the vulnerabilities of U.S. ground forces.”

American ground units could face battlefield scenarios similar to those they faced in Iraq. Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the Quds Force, a wing of the I.R.G.C., who was assassinated by the U.S. in 2src2src, was the primary architect of the offensives used by Iran-backed Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops during the Iraq War. This included planting powerful bombs known as Explosively Formed Penetrators that can rip through U.S. armored vehicles on roads. “Iran has these in abundance. Iran knows how to place them on roadsides. Iran knows how to activate them remotely,” Ostovar told me. The Iranians can also deploy small kamikaze drones called F.P.V.s on surveillance missions or to crash into U.S. troops. The F.P.V.s are controlled by incredibly long fibre-optic cables, preventing attempts to jam their frequencies with radio signals. “Those aren’t super helpful when attacking things very far away, but within a twenty-mile, or fifteen-mile, kind of zone, they could be used pretty effectively,” Ostovar said. “We haven’t seen Iran use them, to my knowledge, at least in this conflict, but they could be saving for a later fight.” The I.R.G.C. also has fleets of fast-attack boats, some of them armed with mines and missiles, and others that can be laden with explosives and used to stage suicide attacks against naval vessels. The regime knows that it doesn’t need to outgun U.S. ground forces to achieve its strategic objectives. It only needs to be successful in occasionally killing American troops to make the war even more unpopular back home, a vulnerability for Trump ahead of the midterm elections. Referring back to the Iran-Iraq War, Connell, the Iranian military expert, said, “If you’re looking at Iranian military writings in the subsequent decades, there’s always that emphasis on, we can take hits.” He explained the Iranian perspective: “We’re willing to die. You are not. You’re going to take a few hits, and then you’re going to say it’s too risky.’ ” Last week, Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national-security committee, warned that “the soldiers of Iran have long been waiting for this historic confrontation with the U.S. military forces,” adding that “the battle on the ground will be more terrifying for you than anywhere else.”

Taking extreme risks, though, could prove disastrous for the regime and its forces, especially the I.R.G.C. During the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini and the I.R.G.C. overplayed their hand and rejected all attempts to end the conflict, even after pushing Iraqi forces from Iranian soil in 1982. Driven by revolutionary zeal, they vowed to keep fighting until Saddam was ousted from power. As the war dragged on, Iran’s military and economy were decimated. To preserve its power and ideology, the I.R.G.C. sent tens of thousands of Iranians to their death in so-called human-wave operations to overwhelm Iraq’s front lines. Last week, the regime launched a similar nationwide recruiting drive called “Janfada,” or “sacrificing life,” seeking volunteers to defend the country against American ground forces, including children as young as twelve, who will operate checkpoints and serve as spies. This time around, though, heavy casualties risk triggering internal mass unrest in a nation where a sizable portion of the population is anti-regime, regardless of their religious embrace of martyrdom. And after the Iran-Iraq War, the I.R.G.C. prioritized the buildup of its asymmetric-war capabilities so much that Iran’s conventional Army, known as the Artesh, was neglected; its infrastructure has atrophied. Iran’s air-defense systems remain weak, allowing U.S. and Israeli warplanes to dominate Iran’s skies in the current conflict. (Of course, the regime still poses a threat to U.S. and Israeli aircraft, as last weekend’s incident reveals.) “At least rhetorically, in terms of propaganda, they’ve been preparing for this for decades,” Ostovar told me, referring to a U.S. invasion. “But there’s also an element of hubris that drives the I.R.G.C., and it’s unclear to me how much that hubris may have undermined their military planning.”

To mobilize Iranians in support of an extended war against the U.S. and Israel, the regime has triggered the memories of Iraq’s invasion that it has nurtured for the past four decades. Over the past month, officials have referred to this war by again using the terms “sacred defense” or as the “imposed war.” Pro-regime Shiites inside and outside Iran have branded Trump as a modern-day “Yazid,” and references to the Battle of Karbala have flooded social media in Iran. Moosavi, the professor of Iranian cultural history, pointed me to an A.I.-generated animation made by an Iranian rapper which has gone viral in the country. It starts with Trump tossing dice at a roulette table, and ends with him crying over American-flag-draped coffins. The lyrics go:

Sacred Defense, we protecting the soil

While you sacrifice soldiers to pay for your spoil

You thought you ran the globe sitting on your throne

Now we turning every base into a bed of stone. ♦