TEHRAN -- As Iran marks the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraqi war of the 1980s on the Islamic Republic, a selection of photographs from the National Library and Archives of Iran brings renewed attention to one of the defining visual records of the country’s recent history.
On September 31, 1980, Iraq launched a large-scale invasion of Iran, striking airports and military installations and advancing across the country’s western and southwestern borders. 
The war continued for almost eight years, ending with a ceasefire on August 20, 1988. Known in Iran as the “Sacred Defense,” the war left an extensive and deeply layered photographic archive documenting both its military realities and its human consequences.
The newly presented photographs come from the archives of the National Library and Archives of Iran and were made by some of the country’s most prominent photographers: Reza and Manouchehr Deghati, the late Kaveh Golestan, Muhammad Farnoud, Alfred Yaghoubzadeh, and Kamran Jebreili.
Rather than presenting the war solely through images of combat, their photographs reveal the war through its surrounding rituals, landscapes and intimate aftermaths. Funerals and burials of fallen soldiers, clerics accompanying troops, devastated or militarized landscapes, and the grief of families all become part of a broader visual testimony.
Together, these works offer more than a record of military history. They form a fragmented portrait of a society living through prolonged conflict—where public ceremony and private mourning, destruction and everyday life, became inseparable parts of the photographic image.
The selection also underscores the role of Iranian photojournalism in shaping the visual memory of the war. Made by photographers whose work has circulated far beyond Iran, the images occupy a space between documentary evidence, personal testimony and historical archive.
The photographs have been drawn from the digital resources of the National Library and Archives of Iran.