Two men hold a banner with the words “No to war”. But one is in a balaclava and is also holding a gallows with a man hanging from it.<\/p>\n
“It’s difficult to work right now,” said the Paris-based artist. “You either get labelled as a lover of the war or of the Islamic Republic.”<\/p>\n
Three exiled Iranian cartoonists who talked to AFP said they were walking the same thin line, with Sanaz Bagheri\u00a0\u2013 who has been working from Amsterdam<\/a> for the last seven years\u00a0\u2013 insisting that they “are doing everything we can to be the voice” of those who cannot speak back home.<\/p>\n Artists have used satire throughout Iran<\/a>‘s turbulent history to circumvent the threat of persecution.<\/p>\n Khamenei and women<\/p>\n Another of Neyestani’s drawings\u00a0\u2013 taking a dig at Tehran’s internet ban\u00a0\u2013 shows Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sitting on the head of a man tied up below a no WIFI sign while declaring: “I am the voice of Iranians.”<\/p>\n “Social media<\/a> is the only way I can communicate with my audience,” said the 52-year-old cartoonist, who has close to a million followers on Instagram alone.<\/p>\n “It’s one of the only ways people inside Iran can stay informed. All official news sources inside Iran only present the government’s narrative.”<\/p>\n But that audience is now effectively cut-off by a near total internet shutdown since the start of the war in February, keeping roughly 90 million Iranians in digital darkness.<\/p>\n French teachers Kohler and Paris describe ‘daily horror’ of Iran detention<\/a><\/p>\n In a central Paris<\/a> gallery a selection of Neyestani’s works currently hangs alongside another award-winning Iranian cartoonist, Kianoush Ramezani, who works from exile in Helsinki.<\/p>\n Supreme Leader<\/a> Ayatollah Khamenei, killed on February 28 at the start of the US-Israel bombing, is a frequent target of their satire.<\/p>\n Women feature prominently, inspired by the “Women, Life, Freedom” demonstrators sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in state custody in 2022.<\/p>\n Sketches include a woman with long flowing hair standing on Khamenei’s burning turban, while another shows hijab-less schoolgirls ripping his portrait from their classroom wall.<\/p>\n “This system is built on sanctifying the supreme leader and other figures within it. They have invested enormous effort and resources to construct this sense of sanctity, and a simple cartoon can undermine it,” Ramezani said.<\/p>\n ‘Dangerous’<\/p>\n “Iranians are sarcastic and are good with humour, but they take political cartoons extremely seriously and that is a problem for us because when they take it too seriously,” he said. “Then it becomes dangerous for us.”<\/p>\n After periods of repression under the Shah’s feared Savvak intelligence services in the 1970s, and the “sacred defence” era declared by the Islamic authorities during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, satire enjoyed a brief respite with a proliferation of reformist newspapers in the 1990s.<\/p>\n But the election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad<\/a> in 2005 turned the tide, with a wave of cartoonists leaving the country after mass protests against Ahmadinejad in 2009, and again with the crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom Movement<\/a>.<\/p>\n