Bad Guys, Good Cartoons: The Cultural Logic of Iran's Proxy Model
How the Axis of Resistance absorbs cultural talent without suppressing it, and what a Houthi cartoonist's trajectory from dissident to regime artist reveals about the proxy model's infrastructure.
A friend of mine once summarized a Houthi cartoon I had shared with him in a way I have not been able to improve on: “Houthis, bad guys, good cartoons.” It was a funny line that made us both laugh, but the artist was no joke. Hostile, antisemitic, someone we would never agree with, and someone who never missed the mark on global events.
Most people scroll past work like this without a second thought, if they notice it at all, because the assumption is that a militia’s media output is not worth serious attention. Analysts make a more refined version of the same mistake. Most analysis of the so-called axis of resistance treats authoritarian media as output, something to decode or flag or map, but rarely ask what it means when the output is genuinely good, when the artwork is compositionally sharp, and the visual argument lands faster than any analyst rebuttal. When the talent we see is not faked or coerced, and when it is not mediocre. What does that tell us about the system that produced it?
Somewhere in Houthi-controlled Sanaa, a man who has almost certainly never set foot in the United States is drawing Jeffrey Epstein with the kind of moral fixation usually reserved for victim advocates, and Donald Trump with a venom most American cartoonists reserve for their own president. He has positions on ICE, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the multinational corporations American progressives have been boycotting for years, and his moral clarity on all of it is so sharp that an American reader would, on first encounter, mistake him for someone whose politics they share. And he has never, not once, turned that talent on the movement he serves.
Kamal Sharaf has been doing this from Sanaa for years. His craft is considerable, but what makes his work worth examining is that it functions as an X-ray of how the proxy system processes talent from the inside. The work itself displays a level of global awareness that most observers would not expect from what is so widely reported as a "ragtag militia.”
What makes his cartoons effective is that so many of them tap into grievances that his audience already holds, and the underlying anger is widely shared. But he is selective about what he shares because he represents the Houthis’ logos, their entire framework for how the world should be seen and spoken about. He will draw about Sudan but not about Bucha. He will draw about Palestinian children killed by Israeli strikes but not about Yemeni children recruited by Houthi summer camps. The moral clarity is always pointed outward, and the boundaries of that clarity map perfectly onto the geopolitical commitments of the axis of resistance. He is exploiting real grievances, and the effect is to position the movement on the right side of causes that have nothing to do with it, making that positioning feel like a coincidence rather than a strategy.
While this essay is about one cartoonist, in reality, it examines the proxy model and how it works at the cultural level, the conditions that produce the propaganda as opposed to the propaganda itself, and what it means when the artist producing it genuinely believes he is free.
The Dissident Years of Kamal Sharaf
In 2010, four years before the Houthi takeover of Yemeni state institutions and well before the current conflict, the government of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrested Sharaf. At the time, he was a cartoonist at Al-Jumhuriya, the official state newspaper, and a government employee at the Ministry of Electricity, and he ran an anti-corruption campaign called Banbsrkum (we will observe you) on Facebook in his spare time. His brother Omar told NewsYemen that masked armed men in civilian and military clothing stormed their home during iftar, handcuffed Kamal, and took him to an unknown location. Reporters Without Borders and IFEX campaigned for his release. Whatever one thinks of Sharaf's politics, then or now, cartoonists should not be imprisoned for drawing, and that principle does not require qualification. It was true in 2010, and it remains true today, including in the territories the Houthis now control, where no such freedom exists.
In the years between his release and the war, Sharaf did what independent artists do. He continued drawing, and his work from this period shows an artist who was genuinely pluralist in his targets. One of the covers he illustrated, for a Taiz satirical journalist's book called Elm Al-Zarreh, a title that sounds like 'nuclear science' but is actually a pun on the Yemeni slang for being squeezed or ground down, caricatures the three pillars of the old regime under the subtitle 'Religion, Dynamite, and Military.' The back cover is a monologue in which a Yemeni man swears he is not a communist, not a Nasserist, not a Brotherhood member, not a separatist, not a Houthi, not al-Qaeda, not northern, not southern, not with the revolution, not against the revolution, until he gives up entirely and says he is Somali. It is a satire of factionalism itself, the impossibility of being simply Yemeni without a label.
Sharaf also joined a civil society caricature project during the 2013 National Dialogue. He wrote an op-ed in Aden Al-Ghad arguing that real intellectuals try to understand people's problems in order to create change, and to open people's eyes to the truth, while the fake ones are afraid of people understanding, because they would be the first to be exposed.' And in early 2015, as the war was starting, he organized a caricature exhibition in Taiz called 'Our Wrong Paths,' which he said would critique 'the negatives of religious discourse that supports the spread of hatred,' and ran a children's cartooning workshop under the banner 'My Beloved Yemen' where kids drew the flag, the republican eagle, folk costumes, and Yemeni architecture, all in service of what he described as 'rooting the values of belonging, love, tolerance, and pride in this country.' That is the tradition Sharaf was working in before the war.
Sharaf's pre-war work leaned towards pluralism, critiquing the failures of politics and religion in Yemeni society without exempting anyone. But when the war redrew the lines, when the Houthis took full power, his sectarian and family alignments determined which side of the new arrangement he landed on. The anti-establishment instinct survived when the establishment changed, and his ideas about the world became narrower, existing only in the Houthi lane.
After the Houthi takeover in 2014 and the Saudi-led intervention in 2015, Sharaf became active on social media, drawing cartoons about the war and circulating his work through pro-Houthi outlets. By 2019, his cartoons were being featured in most of the Houthis' official channels and other more localized and obscure channels, such as al-Hudhud, Hajjah News, and across Houthi-affiliated feeds on Telegram. By the end of the year, he had adopted the Houthi project wholesale.
His creative identity was never taken from him but rather redirected in a way that served the Houthi project entirely. He still describes his work as truth-telling, still speaks of exposing contradictions and refusing to look away, and because the vocabulary of independence survived intact, the asymmetry is almost impossible to detect from the outside. His critique points in every direction except inward, and neither his audience nor, arguably, he himself seems to notice where the boundaries are drawn.
But it would be naive to treat Sharaf as a captured neutral. The Sharafaddine family is Sayyid, part of the theological aristocracy that sits at the core of the Houthi project's claim to legitimacy through Ahl al-Bayt. His brother Hashim served as Information Minister in the Houthi Government of Change and Reconstruction. He is not an outsider who was absorbed by the movement. He is from its upper echelon, ideologically aligned, theologically invested, fighting for his own.
The Houthis have systematically dismantled traditional tribal authority since taking power, imposing Hashemite supervisors above sheikh structures and treating the tribal system as a competitor to be replaced by Sayyid supremacy. Sharaf, a Sayyid from the Sharafaddine family, was drawing against sheikhdom before the Houthis had the power to dismantle it. That was not dissent. That was the movement's position, articulated in ink before it was enforced by arms
Sharaf rejected the hatred that came from the old regime. Whether he recognizes the hatred that comes from his own is a question the cartoons answer more honestly than any interview he has given. The proxy model is not just absorbing outsiders but activating insiders whose alignments were already compatible. The vocabulary of dissent was not surrendered; it was simply the part the system let him keep because it cost the system nothing.
The Artist in the Axis System
What do the Houthis produce when they have genuine talent at their disposal? I spent the better part of a year tracking Sharaf's output as part of Axis Weekly, our newsletter that monitors how the axis of resistance coordinates its narrative across its media nodes. Sharaf kept appearing in all of them. On SABA daily, on Press TV where he was profiled for international audiences without any mention of his Houthi institutional ties, and in Russian outlets circulating his cartoons to frame Trump.
In January 2025, Sharaf was physically in Tehran. Iran's Art Bureau, the cultural arm of the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization, hosted a tribute to him, culminating in the inauguration of a 120-piece exhibition of his work titled 'Kamal Al-Fann.' In attendance were Iranian graphic designers and caricaturists, Russian artists, the family of an Iranian 'martyr' buried in Yemen, the family of the late Iranian ambassador to Yemen Hasan Irlu, the secretary of the Ammar Popular Film Festival, and a representative of the Yemeni embassy in Tehran. He spoke of feeling like 'a soldier in the battle,' quoted Imam Khomeini calling America 'the Great Satan,' and described caricature as 'a form of jihad.' The head of the Yemeni community in Iran noted that Sharaf had 'received a degree of artistic recognition from Abdul-Malik al-Houthi' himself. A Yemeni cartoonist honored in Iran's capital, in a room with Russian artists, the families of Iranian war dead, and an embassy official pledging collaboration 'in all fields of art,' that is not a freelancer being appreciated, that is an infrastructure celebrating one of its own.
In April 2026, Sharaf drew a cartoon depicting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun's head as a football being kicked by the US and Israel, with a Hezbollah figure as goalkeeper. Within hours, Tasnim, the IRGC-linked news agency, republished it. Lebanese officials and activists erupted, calling it an insult to their president. A diplomat described it as 'a departure from international norms governing relations between friendly states.' Tasnim deleted the cartoon without explanation. The cartoon was drawn in Sanaa and republished by the IRGC's media arm in Tehran, and it was enough to trigger a diplomatic crisis with Beirut. What none of the coverage addressed was the more basic question of how a Houthi cartoonist ended up doing the IRGC's political messaging against a sitting head of state in the first place.
Considering Sharaf's modest platform before the war and his rise across the axis of resistance, his evolution can be read in two ways. It could be a consciously chosen alignment, a man drawn to a movement that promised to restore the very social order his forefathers once presided over, the primacy of the Sayyid class over the tribal and republican structures that had displaced it. Or it could be something he would describe as organic, a natural deepening of convictions he always held. Either reading is possible, and both may be partially true. But what neither reading can account for is the specificity of what disappeared from his work. It is not simply that Sharaf stopped critiquing power. It is that the exact subjects he once drew against, militarization, tribalism, the weaponization of children, are the subjects the Houthis now practice at institutional scale, and his brush went silent on each one precisely as the movement adopted it.
On Russian Telegram, the pro-Kremlin war correspondent Abbas Djuma used Sharaf's cartoons to reinforce Russian foreign policy narratives on Syria, while the channel of New Eastern Outlook, linked to the Russian Academy of Sciences, circulated his work on Trump's Middle East tour. In France, Investig'Action, the Belgian anti-imperialist platform run by Michel Collon, published a full profile describing Sharaf as an artist who 'always places himself on the side of the oppressed,' with no mention of Jehad Magazine, no mention of his brother in the Houthi cabinet, and no mention of the Tehran ceremony where he quoted Khomeini and described caricature as a form of jihad. The profile is a case study in itself as it shows what the infrastructure looks like at the receiving end, where the laundering has already been completed, and the cartoonist arrives as a clean product, stripped of every institutional connection that would complicate the story of a brave dissident speaking truth to power.
Wartime and Peacetime Strategy
During periods of active military confrontation between the United States and Iran or its proxies, whether in Yemen, Lebanon, or Gaza, Sharaf’s cartoons target American power projection directly: warships sinking in the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz sealed shut, missiles reaching their targets, the US military rendered impotent. The visual vocabulary is one of humiliation, designed to signal to a regional audience that the superpower can be defied and to signal to a domestic Yemeni audience that the movement is winning.
However, during periods without active conflict, the same artist pivots to something more subtle and, arguably, more corrosive. The warships disappear and are replaced by the Epstein Files, by ICE raids, by Trump’s pursuit of Greenland, by the internal contradictions of American democracy. The target remains the United States, but the attack surface shifts from military posture to societal fracture. The goal is no longer to demoralize an adversary on the battlefield but to corrode the moral authority of a society by amplifying its existing divisions, and to do so using materials that American audiences themselves have produced and are already arguing about. This is not propaganda in the traditional sense of fabrication. It is something closer to curation, the careful selection and reframing of real American failures for an audience that is primed to receive them.
What this pattern reveals is not just a cartoonist responding to the news but a media apparatus that understands the difference between an adversary’s military posture and its social fabric, and knows how to attack each one with different tools at different moments. The same hand that draws a warship sinking in the Red Sea during a military confrontation draws Jeffrey Epstein during peacetime, and the shift happens with the fluency of someone who has internalized not just the politics of the axis of resistance but the politics of the country he is targeting. That is not talent alone. That is infrastructure thinking through an artist’s hand.
The purpose of using American societal fractures is not to persuade Americans, but to insulate the movement’s followers. By curating the worst of the West, Sharaf provides a constant stream of "evidence" that the Houthi path is the only moral alternative. It turns global news into a local psychological anchor, ensuring that the movement’s stance feels like a defensive necessity rather than a political choice.
Inside the Production Line
Iran found a movement with real grievances, real local roots, and real capability, and offered it a deal: keep your identity, keep your resistance vocabulary, point it where we need it, and we will make you more powerful than you ever were. The Houthis were not coerced. They willingly chose to become that proxy. And the people who pay the cost, the Yemeni public, never got to make that choice. I have made this argument for years, in Foreign Policy, in Axis Weekly, in every piece I have written about the Houthi ’ project since the Red Sea crisis began.
Iran's investment in cultural production across its proxy network is not new. The LEGO-style animation videos produced by Hezbollah and its affiliates have drawn attention in recent years, and analysts have begun to study the axis's visual media capabilities as a subject in their own right. But the focus has been on the flashy and the viral, and the quieter, more sustained forms of cultural production, the daily cartoons, the children's magazines, the serialized comics, have received almost no scrutiny. Sharaf is not the exception within this cultural system. He is the evidence of how deep it runs.
The movement found an artist with real talent, real dissident credentials, and real legitimacy, and offered him the same deal. Keep your craft, keep your truth-teller vocabulary, point it where we need it, and we will make you more celebrated than you have ever been. Before the Houthis, Sharaf was marginal, imprisoned under Saleh, writing disclaimers about not being an intellectual, exhibiting in a Taiz cultural center. After the Houthis, he is honored by Islamic Jihad, profiled in Al Mayadeen, interviewed on Al Alam from Tehran, published daily on SABA, circulated on Tasnim, the most visible artist in the entire resistance axis.
The direction of his critique was the price, and the price was cheap, because the vocabulary stayed the same. In a 2022 interview with Al Mayadeen, he described caricature as “shocking, bold, and often rude and merciless” and called a cartoonist who attacks from personal grudge rather than conviction “nothing more than a thug with an artistic brush.” Then he said: “The most important success I achieved in my life was making my art a weapon against the aggressors. Even war has its positives, it is a stimulating environment for resistance and work, for those who possess faith, conviction, and a cause they believe in.”
What Iran did to the Houthis as a movement, the Houthis did to Sharaf as an artist. The proxy relationship is fractal. It looks the same at every scale. Iran builds proxies that believe they are sovereign. Those proxies absorb talent that believes it is free. And the talent produces content that will shape the next generation of children who will never know there was another option.
In The Captive Mind, his 1953 study of intellectuals who accommodated themselves to Stalinism, Czesław Miłosz reached for a concept from Shi’a Islamic tradition: kitman, the protective concealment of one’s true beliefs under conditions of persecution, developed by minority communities surviving under hostile rule. Miłosz used it to describe writers who maintained an inner sense of freedom while outwardly serving the regime, the dissident self preserved in private while the public self performed compliance. What Sharaf demonstrates is the inversion of kitman. The concealment runs the other way. The outer vocabulary is the vocabulary of dissent, of truth-telling, of the brush as a weapon against power, while the inner alignment is with the system that holds power and the cause it serves. He is not hiding his belief from the regime. He is hiding the regime inside his belief. This is what makes his case more troubling than the Arendtian figure of the bureaucrat who participates in atrocity through thoughtlessness. Sharaf is not thoughtless. He is articulate, ideologically self-aware, and sincere in describing himself as an artist of conscience. The danger is not that he has stopped thinking. It is that the thinking itself has been enlisted, and the vocabulary of independence is now the most efficient instrument of its opposite.
Everything discussed so far operates at the level of narrative and political positioning, cartoons aimed at adults who can contextualize them, agree or disagree, and move on. But on the subject of children, Sharaf did not simply go silent. He switched sides.
He once drew a cartoon against the militarization of Sanaa University and against tribal child soldiers carrying guns. Both were legitimate subjects for satire, both were deeply rooted failures of Yemeni governance, and both are now practiced by the Houthis at a scale that dwarfs anything the old regime produced, and yet neither subject has appeared in his work since the movement he serves became responsible for them.
The Youngest Recipients
Sharaf illustrates Jehad Magazine, a children’s publication issued by the Imam al-Hadi Cultural Foundation, a Houthi sectarian institution headquartered in Sanaa with branches in Saada and Al-Mahwit, and in circulation since at least March 2018. It is a monthly children’s magazine issued in two age brackets: ages four to nine, and ages ten to eighteen. It is distributed free across all Houthi-controlled territories, sold in kiosks, libraries, and the Foundation’s own retail centers. Its thirty-six pages contain stories about Shia-Iranian religious figures, legends glorifying Hezbollah, sectarian content promoting the concept of Wilaya (the local adaptation of Iran’s Velayat-e Faqih doctrine), and narratives that frame armed combat and frontline recruitment as heroic and sacred. The magazine’s Telegram channel describes it as serving ‘the generation of dignity and knowledge.’ Its protagonist is a boy named Jehad.
The magazine’s Telegram channel features a recurring segment called “Friends of Jehad,” displaying photographs and full names of its child readers, some as young as three. They are not fictional characters. They are real children, photographed and submitted by their families, displayed like a fan club for a publication that turns an underwater nature adventure into a naval assault operation in three episodes. The promotional material for the youngest edition, targeting ages four to nine, looks indistinguishable from any children’s magazine sold anywhere in the world. That is not an accident. It is the design. The indoctrination works precisely because the packaging does not look like indoctrination. It looks like childhood.
Sharaf illustrates Jehad Magazine with the same skill he brings to everything else. The compositions are careful, the characters are drawn with warmth, and the visual storytelling is genuinely engaging for the age group it targets. That is what makes it so unsettling, because it is the same craft he once used to teach children about tolerance and national pride in Taiz, except now the children following his illustrations are learning that jihad is a civic duty, that enemy ships must be sunk, and that a boy’s journey from photographing sharks to planning a naval assault is a natural progression.
Sharaf's involvement in the Houthi children's infrastructure extends beyond illustration. In April 2026, he posted a cartoon in coordination with the Information Ministry and the Higher Committee for Summer Courses, promoting the Houthi summer indoctrination camps under the hashtags #علم_وجهاد (knowledge and jihad) and #اليمن (Yemen). The slogan is a direct adaptation of Khamenei's doctrine of 'jihad of knowledge,' which frames education as an instrument for safeguarding the revolutionary project, imported from Iran and localized for Yemen the same way the Houthis adapted Velayat-e Faqih into their own concept of Wilaya.
The cartoon mocks a figure warning a Yemeni father to protect his son from the camps, while the father protectively shields the boy. The figure opposing the camps is deliberately drawn as feminized and Westernized, coding resistance to child indoctrination not just as political disloyalty but as sexual deviance, weaponizing conservative social attitudes to shame parents into compliance. The message is not subtle: anyone who questions the program is an enemy of Yemeni identity, and resistance to the indoctrination of your own child is a form of cultural treason. These summer courses, branded under 'Tufan al-Aqsa,' combine Quran recitation with scouting, sport, and combat preparation, running through centers named after Ismail Haniyeh and housed in military hospitals and university campuses. Sharaf is not just drawing for children. He is drawing against the parents who might try to keep them.
Soft power exists for exactly this purpose, and the purpose is not coercion but conversion, a distinction that matters because coercion forces compliance from people who still hold their own beliefs in private, while conversion replaces those beliefs entirely, so that compliance no longer feels like compliance. Authoritarian systems built on force are brittle because the moment the force lifts, the loyalty goes with it. Systems built on conversion are durable because the loyalty is internal, indistinguishable from the person’s own sense of self. And the most effective conversion is the one that starts in childhood, before the child has the vocabulary to recognize it as conversion at all. By the time these children are adults, the worldview will not feel like ideology. It will feel like memory.
If Sharaf's case demonstrates anything, it is that the cultural infrastructure of the axis of resistance is not a sideshow to the military one but a parallel system with its own production lines, distribution networks, and long-term objectives. And yet, while the military infrastructure has been met with designations, interdictions, and sanctions, the cultural infrastructure remains almost entirely unaddressed.
The European Union has sanctioned Russian media figures for their role in information warfare, recognizing that propaganda is not a passive act but an instrument of state power with measurable consequences. Kamal Sharaf operates within an identical framework, producing content that circulates across the same geopolitical alliance, and illustrating a children's magazine that functions as a recruitment pipeline for a designated terrorist organization. If the standard for sanctioning propagandists is their role in sustaining an authoritarian system's capacity to project power and reproduce itself, then the question of why figures like Sharaf remain outside that framework deserves an answer.
The most dangerous participants in an authoritarian system are rarely the ones who act out of cruelty. They are the ones who act out of professional competence, out of routine, out of the simple belief that they are doing their job well, what Hannah Arendt would have recognized as the banality of evil, the moment where professional competence becomes indistinguishable from complicity, not because the participant is cruel but because he is good at his job. Sharaf is not a torturer. He is not a recruiter standing at a checkpoint sorting boys by age. He is a cartoonist sitting at a digital tablet, drawing a child character with warmth and skill for a magazine that exists to narrow that child’s world to a single slogan, a single enemy, a single acceptable future. He does it with the same care he once brought to a workshop in Taiz where children drew the republican eagle under a banner that said “My Beloved Yemen.” That is what makes it evil. Not the intention, which may well be sincere. But the function, which is to close a child’s eyes using a gift that was built to open them.
Political cartoons aimed at adults are, in the end, limited in what they can do because adults bring their own frameworks and can choose to accept or reject what they are shown. Work aimed at children operates on an entirely different plane, and it is here that Sharaf may be more dangerous than any weapon system in the Houthis’ arsenal. When he illustrates a publication that reaches children as young as four, he is not making an argument that can be countered. He is building the architecture inside which all future arguments will take place. The child does not evaluate the content. The content becomes the child. A generation of Yemeni children is growing up inside a visual world that Sharaf helped construct, one in which hatred is moral clarity, martyrdom is aspiration, and the only heroes are the ones holding weapons. By the time these children are old enough to encounter a different version of the world, the first version will have become so deeply embedded that it will feel not like ideology but like memory, like something they have always known, like something that was always true
He wrote in 2014 that the real intellectuals open people’s eyes to the truth, and that the fake ones are afraid of understanding, because they would be the first to be exposed.
He was right.
And the children reading Jehad Magazine will never know it.
Gallery- Collection of Articles and Kamal Sharaf Visual Propaganda
The Dissident Years of Kamal Sharaf
The Artist in the Axis System
Wartime and Peacetime Strategies
Inside the Production Line
The Youngest Recipients
Very interesting, as usual. But I wonder if the 'creativity'/sophistication is a more a function of the propagation mechanism -- the software -- than the commissioners, or their client-proxies.
"Houthis with Ubers" (or cruise missiles) isn't necessarily a sign of sophistication, but the ability to apply a template. And the IRGC's outsourced lego-shaping, allegedly indigenous, ingenious, youth-run propaganda could be following the same instructions the Houthi cartoonist does.
I imagine this particular form of 'creativity' is neither IRGC, nor Houthi, but crowd-sourced and global. 'Whatever works' is flagged, rewarded, branded, and pushed out as the standard to emulate. The original 'idea' might come from Copenhagen, or Bangkok, or Ta'iz.
In 1970s-early 2000s Libya, some of the (few) in-country satirists operated on multiple levels: one always visibly served the regime and maintained 'acceptability'; another, much more subtle, was deeply anti-regime. Is there any evidence of this in the author's work? Whatever the case, as soon as a caricaturist loses slght of the universality of this targets, he/she is doomed as an artist, and becomes a gun for hire.