He studied Geology in the University of Tehran, and joined Gol-Agha, an Iranian political satire magazine as a cartoonist in 1991.

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi's nickname comes from a cartoon portraying "Professor Crocodile", a "reptilian academic who was shown strangling a journalist with his tail".

The cartoon was drawn by Nikahang Kowsar and satirized freedom of expression in Iran, and a speech given by Mesbah Yazdi in the previous day.

[1] In 2001, he sent an apology letter to Mesbah, and the cleric had said that he had accepted it, but later in 2003 Kowsar received a death threat, from and Islamist assassin group.

He also has been free-lancing and his cartoons have been recently published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and The Guardian.

He has appeared on CNN, BBC, CBC, CTV, VOA and many political TV shows as a guest analyst and observer.

Kowsar has criticized the reformist leaders for not taking responsibility for their acts in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war and mass-executions of political activists in Iran.

He was quoted by Thomas Friedman on Iran's water situation: “When people lose their lands they lose everything, and that means they aren’t scared of anything,” explained Nikahang Kowsar, an Iranian exile geologist, and son of a watershed scientist, who grew up in southern Iran.