The Iranian president was traveling by helicopter in the province of East Azerbaijan when it crashed in a forested area.
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi died after a helicopter carrying him and other officials crashed in a mountainous and forested area of the country due to bad weather.
The 63-year-old, a figure who represents conservative and hard-line factions in Iranian politics, was president for nearly three years and appeared poised to run for re-election next year.
Former president of the Supreme Court, Raisi was named as a potential successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 85-year-old supreme leader of Iran.
Raisi was born in Mashhad in northeastern Iran, a religious center for Shia Muslims. He received religious education and was trained at the Qom seminary, studying under prominent scholars including Khamenei.
Also like the supreme leader, he wore a black turban, which signified that he was a sayyid – a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, a status with particular significance among Twelver Shia Muslims.
Raisi accumulated experience as a prosecutor in multiple jurisdictions before coming to Tehran in 1985. It was in the capital that, according to human rights organizations, he was part of a committee of judges that oversaw the executions of political prisoners.
The late president was a longtime member of the Assembly of Experts, the body tasked with choosing a replacement for the supreme leader in the event of his death.
He became prosecutor general in 2014 for two years, when he was appointed by Khamenei to lead Astan Quds Razavi. The colossal bonyad, or charitable trust, has billions of dollars in assets and is the guardian of the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam.
Raisi initially ran for president in 2017, unsuccessfully challenging the re-election of former president Hassan Rouhani, who represented the centrist and moderate camps.
After a brief hiatus, Raisi made headlines as the new head of the Iranian judiciary, having been appointed by Khamenei in 2019. He presented himself as a defender of justice and a fighter against corruption, and made many provincial trips to drum up popular support. . .
Raisi became president in 2021, in a context of low electoral participation and widespread disqualification of reformist and moderate candidates, and seemed to have secured a solid basis for re-election.
Like other senior Iranian officials, his harshest rhetoric was reserved for Israel and the United States, followed by his Western allies.
Raisi has made many speeches since the start of the war in Gaza in October to condemn the “genocide” and “massacres” committed by Israel against the Palestinians, and called for the intervention of the international community.
He vowed revenge against Israel after the country destroyed Tehran’s consulate building in Syria and killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals.
And he welcomed Iran’s response, which consisted of launching hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were shot down by a coalition of Israeli allies – but left Iran claiming overall success.
Raisi was aggressive regarding Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was left in limbo after former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018 .
He was a supporter of the strategic policy of “resistance” and “resilience” that Khamenei adopted in the face of the toughest sanctions ever faced by Iran – imposed after the failure of the nuclear deal.
A close ally of the IRGC, the late president was also a staunch supporter of the “axis of resistance” of political and armed groups that Iran supports across the region, including in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
And he was a strong supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who Iran supported in his government’s war against the Syrian opposition, which left hundreds of thousands dead.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
