Nik Kowsar: Iran's war on the supernatural

When an Iranian regime insider recently claimed Israel had deployed “supernatural spirits” in its latest war with Iran — complete with Jewish talismans allegedly found on the streets of Tehran — I didn’t laugh. I didn’t scoff. I felt déjà vu.

I’ve heard this sort of nonsense before, not from fringe conspiracy theorists, but from senior officials inside the Islamic Republic. Iran is the kind of place where absurdity isn’t an outlier in government; it’s baked into the bureaucracy. A country where horse magazines are discussed in the same buildings that host national security briefings, and where ex-ministers still clutch their old relevance like aging rock stars on a farewell tour.

Let me take you back.

August 1997. A new president had taken office. The outgoing ministers — too connected to discard, too irrelevant to matter — were quietly “parked” in offices inside the Supreme National Security Council building. I was summoned to help one of them, now rebranded as head of the National Equestrian Federation, design a glossy magazine about horse sports.

Yes, horse sports. Because obviously, what the Islamic Republic needed most in a time of post-war reconstruction and political reform was expert coverage on saddle polish and show jumping.

Minutes into the meeting, it went off the rails. Two former ministers and a deputy president wandered in, and what began as an editorial pitch turned into an impromptu cabinet reunion — with bodyguards loitering outside and egos floating freely inside.

Then came the part I was never supposed to hear.

A former minister confidently predicted Iran would possess a nuclear bomb by 2005. Bold, yes, but at least grounded in physical reality. The next revelation, however, catapulted the meeting straight into the realm of magical realism.

Dr. Hadi Manafi, former head of Iran’s Environmental Protection Agency — and, as it turns out, president of the Medical Hypnosis Association (yes, that’s real) — casually informed the room the Ministry of Intelligence was exploring how to recruit genies for espionage.

Yes. Genies.

“I was assigned to speak with Grand Ayatollah Bahjat,” he said, “to find a way to recruit the jinn.”

Then, with a straight face: “We were told to only recruit Shiite jinn.”

That’s right. While allegedly working toward a nuclear arsenal, Iran’s intelligence services were conducting sectarian background checks on supernatural beings. You couldn’t make this stuff up, unless you were on the government payroll.

We were warned, quietly but clearly, that we were never supposed to hear any of it. No clearance. No deniability. We were told that talking about the “bomb or the jinn” outside that room would make us vanish. And in that system, they meant it.

I never said a word.

And yet, a few years later, after I drew a satirical cartoon, I was arrested and interrogated. The judiciary demanded I confess the idea behind it had come from Israel. Apparently, even my satire had foreign handlers.

Fast forward to 2025.

That same magical paranoia is back, this time on social media. A regime insider, reportedly close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ information units, posted on X that during Iran’s recent 12-day clash with Israel, “Jewish talismans” were found on the streets of Tehran. Clear evidence, he claimed, of supernatural warfare.

This is where we are now.

The same government that claims to master hypersonic missile tech and uranium enrichment is now spinning tales of occult attacks and invisible spirits. Their narrative machine has evolved from martyrdom to magic, from missiles to mysticism.

So in the next chapter of this geopolitical absurdity, I fully expect a supernatural arms race: I wouldn’t be surprised if Tehran’s not-so- intelligent Intelligence Ministry is already plotting a counterstrike — firing their vetted Shiite genies through a “Genie Iron Dome.”

Because in the Islamic Republic, fantasy isn’t a distraction from statecraft.

It is statecraft.

Nik Kowsar is an award-winning Iranian-American journalist, cartoonist and water issues analyst based in Washington, D.C.