LONDON (AP) — With one puff of a cigarette, a Canadian woman became a global symbol of defiance against Iran’s bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.
A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman – who described herself as an Iranian refugee – opening a lighter and setting fire to a photograph she was holding. It lights up, illuminating the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette in the glow, takes a quick hit – and lets what’s left of the image fall to the pavement.
Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there is plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s struggling economy, as US President Donald Trump again considers military action in the country.
The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real world, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.
In the 34 seconds of footage, many on platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw a person defy a number of laws and norms of theocracy in a captivating act of autonomy. She does not wear a hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the headscarf imposed by the regime.
She burns an effigy of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair is cascading—yet another violation in the eyes of the Iranian government. She lights a cigarette from the flame – a gesture considered immodest in Iran.
And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times, she goes down in history.
A battle for narrative control
In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control of conflict. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long portrayed it as a plot by outsiders like the United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
And both sides are racing to tell the story that will endure.
Iranian state media is reporting wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting what it calls “terrorists” and also reportedly going after Starlink satellite internet antennas, the only way to broadcast video and images over the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat quelled dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protests or unrest in Iran in decades and is reminiscent of the chaos of the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
Social media has been abuzz with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke them if you got them. #Iran,” posted Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.
In the age of artificial intelligence, misinformation and disinformation, there is ample reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when the “cigarette girl” appeared online this month, many users did just that.
It was not immediately clear, for example, whether she was igniting in Iran or somewhere with free speech protections in solidarity. Some saw a background that appeared to be in Canada. She confirmed this in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?
Many have wondered: Is “Cigarette Girl” an example of “psiops?” And that is not clear. This is a feature of war and state action as old as human conflict, where an image or sound is deliberately spread by someone who has a stake in the outcome. From fake Allied radio broadcasts during World War II to nuclear missile parades in the Cold War, history is rich with examples.
The US military doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group from Ft. North Carolina’s Bragg released a recruiting video last year called “Ghost in the Machine 2, which is peppered with ‘PSYWAR’ references.” And the Gaza war featured a fierce battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to smile and pose publicly before they were released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.
Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman’s act was powerful enough to spread around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.
The woman behind the images
The woman did not respond to multiple attempts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she spoke to other outlets, and the AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.
On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the screen name Morticia Addams — after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — simply out of her interest in “scary things,” she said in an interview with the nonprofit The Objective.
She is not allowing her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran – where she says she was arrested and abused – to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status and lives in Toronto.
There, on January 7, he filmed what became known as the “cigarette girl” one day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.
“I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview with CNN-News18, an affiliate network in India.
In interviews, the woman said she was first arrested at age 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, which erupted after Trump pulled the US out of the nuclear deal Iran struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.
“I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by providing a bail slip. “I’ve been under surveillance since then.”
In 2022, during protests following Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, she said she attended a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.
The woman said she was interrogated and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse”. Then, without explanation, she was released on high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and eventually global notoriety.
“All my family members are still in Iran and I haven’t heard from them for several days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m really worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”