Leave it to the bloodthirsty, despotic mullahs running the totalitarian regime in Iran to turn the sacred institution of marriage into a grotesque assembly line for human shields.
On Monday, the Islamic Republic staged mass public weddings across Tehran for hundreds of young couples. But this wasn’t a celebration of love or family; it was a sick, state-sponsored propaganda stunt designed to boost wartime morale. Under the shadow of a giant image of the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — who inherited power after his father was eliminated on day one of the war — couples arrived at Imam Hossein Square in military jeeps mounted with machine guns.
These couples were there to enlist in the regime’s twisted janfada (“self-sacrifice”) scheme. By signing up, these brainwashed or coerced newlyweds literally pledged to sacrifice their lives for the state — agreeing to form human chains outside targeted power stations to act as shields against potential U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. One bride, clad in a white Islamic dress, spoke to state media as if this madness were normal, saying, “Certainly, the country is at war, but young people also have the right to marry.”
The sheer desperation of this tyrannical regime is entirely on brand, as the regime views its own population as completely expendable. Just two months ago, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officially lowered the minimum age for military support roles to just 12 years old, deploying heavily armed, untrained children to roam the streets of Tehran with assault rifles.
The mullahs are pulling directly from their darkest, bloodiest playbook. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the regime notoriously sent tens of thousands of children — some as young as 12 — into “human wave” attacks, handing them plastic “Keys to Paradise” before forcing them to detonate Iraqi minefields with their own bodies.
Now, facing a renewed existential threat from President Donald Trump, the regime is doing what it has always done: using the most vulnerable as meat shields. Whether it is 12-year-old boys at checkpoints or newlyweds in bridal gowns on the front lines, the survival of the dictatorship is all that matters to Tehran.