Abdulrahman al-Tariri

Scars of Iranian Maps

21 July 2026 - 23:58 | Last update 21 July 2026 - 23:58

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Visual significance is much more important than words... That is what journalism taught us. Thus, the pattern of a tie worn by a leader like Sadat during his visit to Israel has its symbolism, just as the color of the tie gives partisan and intellectual connotations, whether in the East, as seen in Lebanon, all the way to the far west of the continent in the United States and Canada. Likewise, images in backgrounds and during visits matter.

In the era of virtual meetings, guests appear on channels, each trying to send a message through the book behind them, or the painting or picture, and some from an ordinary home room, making the non-message their message, as if telling you: focus on what I say. As for the speakers and analysts from Iran, some of whom are Revolutionary Guard officers in the garb of academics and analysts, they are keen on a common background.

This background is in most cases a map, showing Iran and its central location, as a country with borders with seven countries, and its gateways to Asia, China and Russia via the Caspian Sea to the north, and a gulf it calls 'Persian' as an attempt to dominate geography more than an attempt to describe geography, with coasts extending 1,800 km to the Strait of Hormuz in the south, as an area through which it can choke maritime trade routes and harass opponents even if weaker than them, benefiting from the mountainous nature east of the strait.

Geography in the Iranian psyche can be viewed on more than one level. First, with the establishment of the Safavid state in 1501 by Shah Ismail I, the unifying context of Persian identity was founded by declaring Twelver Shia Islam as the state religion. Although the name Iran predates the Safavids, what was achieved with them is geography as a connected political unit, wider than Iran's geography today, and most importantly sentimentally, it controlled Iraq with the Najaf reference, thus a unifying Shia framework unlike the state that antagonized it at the time, the Ottoman rule.

But the map became a scar and wound in memory, especially during the 19th century, when Iran was permanently stripped of the South Caucasus territories after the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, relinquishing Georgia, Dagestan, and Azerbaijan. Fifteen years later, another humiliation came to Iran through the Treaty of Turkmenchay, which led to the removal of Armenia from its map.

In the second half of the century, what was called the Great Game occurred, or nibbling pieces of Iran to be on the table of the British-Russian conflict. The Treaty of Herat in 1857 ended Britain's conflict with the Qajar state (which ruled Iran until 1925), leading to Iran's abandonment of Herat and Afghanistan, making Afghanistan a buffer state between British India and Tsarist Russia. It was followed years later by the Treaty of Akhal in 1881, and Iran lost a new part of its geography, namely today's Turkmenistan, to Russia.

This historical background of an empire that historically sought expansion; Khomeini's thought came to rekindle the nostalgia for expansion through exporting the revolution. Then came the conflict with Saddam Hussein, from which the Iranians learned two lessons: first, to distribute your missiles and launch platforms, multiply decoy targets, increase efficiency in using mountain caves, and diversify entrances to warehouses and caves as much as possible, so as not to be an easy prey like Saddam's army in '91.

As for the other thing that the Revolutionary Guard regime learned from Saddam, it is the importance of drawing a map of the surrounding geography, which represents the protective bracelet on the wrist, so that the battle is not in Iran again. Thus, it created the 'axis of gambling', with persistence in exploiting all available opportunities like the Arab Spring, through which Tehran's discourse transformed into an Islamic discourse rising above sectarian talk. Then the discourse rose with rising ambition, portraying itself as a protector of non-Muslim minorities in the East.

But everything that happened from October 7, 2023, to the Twelve-Day War, changed much in the mindset of the Iranian regime, and it began to forge a strategy of unity of strikes, not unity of fronts, after the departure of Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Bashar al-Assad.

In this context, we understand Abbas Araghchi's boasting in his first interview with Iranian local media, when he boasted that the region was shocked by being targeted by Iran, and that no one will export oil as long as we do not export. This can be called 'geography of harm', which does not target, for example, the US Incirlik base in Turkey, and of course does not target direct American and Israeli targets that could inflict harm on Iranian geography.

And we see the geography of absurdity extending by exporting weapons to the Houthis on civilian aircraft to urge them to close the Bab el-Mandeb, which means expanding the circle of harm to Egypt, which considers the Suez Canal one of the most important treasury revenues that has seen growth in recent months.

But what rapidly raises the numbers on the regime's pulse meter is the fear of an American ground landing that would snatch Bandar Abbas from the Iranian map, or some other islands used in the blockade of Hormuz. How could it not, when it sees even Europeans have reached a conviction that does not object to abandoning some of Ukraine's geography to stop the war with Putin.