This presentation examines the culture of commemoration surrounding Iranian-sponsored militias active in the Syrian War. Known as the “Shrine Defenders” (Modafe'an Haram in Persian), they have provided significant support to Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria and in Iran. Within Iran, they have been presented as an essential defense against ISIS and one of the reasons for the group’s inability (for the most part) to launch attacks on the Islamic Republic. The presentation will focus on the image of the fighters within Iranian media and state-sponsored cultural production and how it has emerged as a point of contention among groups who see the fighters as a needless economic burden and unnecessarily involving Iran in a foreign war. These critiques, however, also expose certain anxieties about the type of Iran-centric, Shi’i nationalist project that elements within the Islamic Republic (particularly the Revolutionary Guards) are currently promoting. Within this framework, the presentation will focus on three main issues: 1) the language and iconography used to celebrate the Shrine Defenders in Iranian media and state-sponsored cultural production; 2) the tension over the national identities of many of the Shrine Defenders, who, in addition to being Iranian, are also Afghan, Arab and Pakistani; 3) the comparison of the culture of the Shrine Defenders with that of the culture of “Sacred Defense” that emerged during the Iran-Iraq War.