About Defa Press News Agency

Defa Press News Agency

Defa Press is an Iranian news agency devoted to defence affairs and to the memory of the Holy Defense — the term used in Iran for the country's resistance during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, known in Persian as the Sacred Defence. Publishing from Tehran at defapress.ir, with an English-language service alongside its Persian output, it covers the Iranian armed forces, veterans and martyrs of the war, military technology and regional security. The Global State Media Monitor describes Defa Press as the news outlet associated with the Iranian armed forces and the Ministry of Defence, grouping it with the official news sites of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and the Basij as an institutional military communication platform.

An agency built around the Holy Defense

The agency's name and mission derive from the war that defines modern Iran's military identity. The Iran-Iraq War began with Iraq's invasion in 1980 and lasted eight years; in Iranian official language it is the Imposed War, and its defence is sacred. Preserving the record of that war — its operations, its commanders, its martyrs and its veterans — is a standing cultural and institutional project in Iran, overseen by bodies such as the Foundation for the Preservation and Publication of Sacred Defense and Resistance Works and Values, whose appointments and activities Defa Press reports. The agency functions as the news arm of that remembrance: its archive is filled with oral-history interviews, wartime anecdotes and commemorations, alongside current defence news.

Institutional position

According to the State Media Monitor's 2025-26 review of Iranian media, Defa Press is a state-controlled website tied to military organisations, associated with the Iranian armed forces and the Ministry of Defence, and functioning as an institutional communication and propaganda platform rather than a news outlet in the conventional journalistic sense. The monitor notes that such platforms are nonetheless relevant to understanding Iran's state-aligned information environment, and their material is referenced in profiles of the country's larger state broadcasters and agencies. Readers approaching Defa Press should therefore understand it as the defence establishment speaking in its own voice — authoritative for official positions and commemorations, and aligned with that establishment's perspective.

What it publishes in Persian and English

Defa Press publishes continuous news in Persian, with an English service carrying a selection of its reporting for foreign readers. Its English headlines range across Iran's defence posture and regional role: analyses of missile self-sufficiency, assessments of American and Israeli strategy, coverage of joint exercises, and reports from across the region it associates with the resistance front. Its most-viewed lists are dominated by military and geopolitical subjects. The bilingual structure mirrors that of other Iranian institutional agencies, serving a domestic audience in Persian while presenting the defence establishment's positions abroad in English.

Recording the war's memory

A distinctive share of the agency's work is documentary rather than journalistic in the daily sense. Its interviews preserve veterans' testimony in detail: in one recorded account, a veteran described how fighters, eager to reach the front without completing a two-month training period, used forged deployment letters — ten such letters, he said, were used by men who went on to be martyred — and how misleading labels were painted on ammunition boxes, marked as loader spare parts, chemical fertiliser or tractor shafts, to deceive enemy infiltrators during transport. Stories of this kind, gathered decades after the war, are the raw material of Iran's official war memory, and Defa Press is one of the institutions collecting them before the wartime generation passes.

Sacred Defense Week and commemoration

The agency's calendar peaks with Sacred Defense Week, the annual commemoration of the war's outbreak. It carries the statements issued for the occasion by the armed forces: in one recent year, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps marked the forty-sixth anniversary of the start of the resistance by describing the Sacred Defense as a strategic school for generating national power and unity, a golden chapter that produced social capital, national cohesion and strategic self-belief, and by presenting its lessons as the foundation of a multi-layered defence system extending across cognitive, cyber, economic and strategic domains. Defa Press's role in such weeks is to give these institutional messages a permanent, citable form.

A source for international media

Because senior commanders give interviews to Defa Press, its reports are regularly cited by international news organisations covering Iranian defence. When Iran replaced air-defence systems damaged in its June conflict with Israel, the statement came from Mahmoud Mousavi, deputy for operations of the regular army, in a Defa Press report carried by international outlets: some air-defence units had sustained damage, he acknowledged, but forces had used domestic resources and pre-positioned systems stored in secure locations to restore protection of the country's airspace. Similarly, a deputy commander of the Army's Air Defense Force, Brigadier General Mohammad Yousefi Khoshqalb, used a Defa Press interview to reject foreign claims that Iran's air defences had been weakened, pointing to the development and deployment of advanced drones as a routine, continuing process. Foreign editors treat the agency as a channel for on-record Iranian military statements.

The same pattern appears in domestic security coverage. In the autumn of 2026, Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali, the longtime head of Iran's Passive Defense Organization, sat down for an interview with Defa Press in Tehran and was pressed about the security risks of senior officials wearing smartwatches, after a string of assassinations of Iranian officials and major security breaches that included the 2018 theft of the nuclear archive and the 2024 killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse. His dismissive reply — asking whether the interviewer had a smart TV at home, and remarking that if Iran were at war there would be no flights — was reported internationally by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which treated the Defa Press interview as the on-record source. The episode illustrates the agency's dual audience: it speaks to the defence community at home, and it is monitored abroad as the Iranian military establishment's own microphone.

Defence industry and exercises

The agency reports the defence establishment's current activities as well as its history. Its archive covers joint exercises such as the Sahand 2025 anti-terrorist exercise, held with member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and hosted by the IRGC Ground Force in East Azerbaijan Province, and it reports the armed forces' own interpretation of such events — including calls by the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces to transfer the experiences of the Sacred Defense and regional resistance to the new generation as a strategic asset. Appointments within the Sacred Defense foundation, ceremonies honouring martyrs' families, and statements by commanders on readiness all fall within its daily brief.

The shrine defenders and later wars

Defa Press's remit extends from the 1980s war to Iran's later military engagements. Its reporting includes the shrine defenders — Iranian military advisers killed in Syria, whose name refers to the defence of Shia holy shrines — as in its 2017 report of the IRGC Ground Force commander, Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour, vowing revenge against terrorists who had killed Iranian advisers there. By placing current operations in a line of descent from the Holy Defense, the agency performs the defence establishment's preferred framing: one continuous history of resistance from the Imposed War to the present.

Place in Iran's media system

Iranian media directories list Defa Press among the country's news agencies, and its Persian name identifies it as the Holy Defense news service. Among Iran's many agencies it is the specialist for defence and war memory: where the official Islamic Republic News Agency covers the state as a whole and the Guards' and Basij's own sites cover their respective forces, Defa Press covers the armed forces collectively and curates the national memory of the Iran-Iraq War. For readers inside Iran it is a commemorative institution; for readers outside, it is a monitored source for the Iranian military's public statements, valued precisely because it speaks for the establishment it serves.