During the final decades of the twentieth century, the Middle East was the stage of large-scale military conflicts, notably the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, that reshaped regional geopolitics and visual-media production. War posters, as instruments of visual communication circulating within distinct cultural settings, played a central role in shaping the collective experience of war and constructing ideologically charged narratives that went far beyond simple propaganda. Rather than mere devices for information or mobilization, these visual texts organized subjectivities and drew boundaries between self and other. Comparative studies of representational strategies across neighboring yet ideologically distinct Middle Eastern cultures remain scarce, and Persian-language scholarship has paid limited attention to this intersection of image and ideology. Deeply addressing this gap, the present study undertakes a comparative visual analysis of three war posters produced in the 1980s: an Iranian poster from the Iran-Iraq War, an Afghan poster from the anti-Soviet resistance, and an Iraqi poster from the Ba'athist propaganda campaign against Iran. The central question asks how the politics of representation is organized across images from three distinct cultures sharing a common timeframe. To answer this question, the study applies the social semiotic framework developed by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, examining each poster through its representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions, along with the related notion of visual modality. Methodologically, the research follows a qualitative, library-based, document-driven design. Three posters were purposively selected from digital and physical archives and war-related collections based on thematic, geographical, temporal, and perspectival diversity, all produced within a shared historical window (the 1980s to early 1990s) by state-affiliated or partisan media. Supporting textual materials, including scholarly articles and historical records, were gathered to contextualize each image's background and inform the semiotic reading. No fieldwork, interviews, or questionnaires were employed; the analysis relies on visual and documentary evidence, examining participants, actions, gaze, angle, framing, color, and composition in each poster. The findings show that although all three posters mobilize religious motifs, heroic figures, and national scripts to construct narratives of struggle, resistance, and legitimacy, their representational logic and structure diverge, reflecting each country's cultural-ideological context. The Iranian poster foregrounds collective participation through a multi-actor composition—a soldier, a cleric, a barefoot youth, and a veiled woman holding a child and a red flower—arranged in a circular structure that fuses religious symbolism with popular mobilization; the enemy remains visually absent, invoked only through the trilingual inscription "Sacred Defense Week" and the implicit presence of arms. An eye-level angle and moderate modality invite the viewer into a shared plane of identification rather than distant observation. The Afghan poster centers a lone mujahid rendered in flat, high-contrast color and simplified line, standing before a defeated red bear symbolizing the Soviet Union, with the Quran in one hand and a raised Kalashnikov in the other; a slightly low angle magnifies his stature, the absent gaze produces an offer-type image meant for admiration rather than address, and the slogan "Allahu Akbar" beside the Latin-script word AFGHANISTAN fuses religious legitimacy with an internationally legible national identity. The Iraqi poster glorifies Arab supremacy through a mounted warrior in dynamic, diagonal motion, enveloped by dense Arabic calligraphy functioning as both aesthetic ground and marker of an all-encompassing Arab identity; the Persian enemy is never depicted, appearing only through the derogatory reference "al-'Aduw al-Farisi" and the historically loaded title "Saddam's Qadisiyyah," reactivating the seventh-century Arab-Sasanian battle to naturalize enmity toward Iran as ancient and inevitable. Across all three cases, the enemy is erased, diminished, or reduced to text rather than depicted, an omission that concentrates attention on the heroism and legitimacy of the self. The discussion further shows that each poster mobilizes distinct interactive and compositional resources—gaze, social distance, framing, color—to position the viewer ideologically, and that the line between passive representation and discursive agency blurs: rather than reflecting war, these images construct realities viewers are invited to inhabit, join, or resist. The Iranian poster invites participatory identification, the Afghan poster delivers an unambiguous, slogan-like message, and the Iraqi poster performs myth-making that persuades through symbolic authority rather than dialogue. This approach highlights how visual form transforms historical memory into persuasive political narratives within wartime communication. The study finally concludes that representation strategies are shaped by each nation's historical and socio-political configuration, particularly the religion-state relationship in producing legitimacy, the degree of individual versus collective focus in resistance, and the role of gender and ethnicity in addressing the audience. While the findings, grounded in three symbolic cases, cannot be unconditionally generalized, the extracted patterns—enemy erasure, identity-forming symbols, and viewing-angle strategies—offer a substantive contribution to understanding how images function as active instruments of meaning-making, legitimacy, and emotional-political structuring in wartime, and call for further cross-cultural research into how meaning, identity, and ideology are negotiated through imagery in conflict zones