A child of the Eighties, my memories of that decade almost all have an image of the Ayatollah Khomeini embedded in them. His face was plastered on every empty wall in my hometown of Ahvaz, on our TV screens, even on the first page of our textbooks at school, and later on, after his death, on all bill denominations. The ubiquity of his likeness spoke absolute power. But on a return visit to Iran, in 2015, I began to notice how ubiquitous the image of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a man whose name few people had known just a few years earlier, had become. As if the Quds Force commander hadn’t been romanticized enough, the US military, at President Trump’s behest, assassinated him by drone strike on January 3, 2020, in a fashion that neatly aligned with Shia martyrdom mythology.
Source : The Martyrdom of Soleimani in the Propaganda Art of Iran
