Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline protégé of the country’s supreme leader who helped oversee the mass executions of thousands of people in 1988 and then led the country as it enriched uranium near weapons-grade levels and launched a major attack with drones and missiles against Israel, has died. He was 63 years old.
Raisi’s sudden death, along with that of Iran’s foreign minister and other officials in Sunday’s helicopter crash in northwest Iran, came as Iran struggles with internal dissent and its relations with the wider world. Raisi, first a cleric, once kissed the Koran, the Islamic holy book, before the United Nations and spoke more like a preacher than a statesman when he addressed the world.
Raisi, who previously lost a presidential election to the relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani in 2017, ended up coming to power four years later in a vote carefully managed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to eliminate any major opposition candidates.
His arrival came after the nuclear deal signed by Rouhani with world powers was left in tatters after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal, setting in motion years of renewed tensions between Tehran and Washington.
But although it said it wanted to rejoin the deal, Raisi’s new administration rejected international inspections, in part over an alleged ongoing sabotage campaign carried out by Israel against its nuclear program. Talks in Vienna to restore the agreement remained stalled during the first months of his administration.
“Sanctions are America’s new form of war with the nations of the world,” Raisi told the United Nations in September 2021.
And he added: “The policy of ‘maximum oppression’ is still in force. We want nothing more than what is rightfully ours.”
Mass protests swept the country in 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been detained for allegedly not wearing a hijab or headscarf, as the authorities liked. The security crackdown that lasted months after the protests killed more than 500 people and more than 22,000 were detained.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iran was responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Amini’s death.
Then came the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, in which Iranian-backed militias attacked Israel. Tehran launched an extraordinary attack on Israel in April, in which hundreds of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles were fired. Israel, the United States and their allies shot down the projectiles, but that demonstrated the extent to which the years-long shadow war between Iran and Israel had simmered.
Khamenei appointed Raisi, a former Iranian attorney general, in 2016 to head the Imam Reza charitable foundation, which runs a conglomerate of businesses and donations in Iran. It is one of many bonyads, or charitable foundations, fueled by donations or assets confiscated after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These foundations offer no public accounting of their expenditures and are answerable only to Iran’s supreme leader. The Imam Reza charity, known in Farsi as “Astan-e Quds-e Razavi”, is believed to be one of the most important. Analysts estimate its value at tens of billions of dollars, as it owns nearly half the land in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city.
In appointing Raisi to the foundation, Khamenei called him a “trustworthy person with high-profile experience.” That led analysts to speculate that Khamenei could be grooming Raisi as a possible candidate to be Iran’s third supreme leader, a Shiite cleric who has the final say in all state affairs and serves as the country’s commander-in-chief.
Although Raisi lost his 2017 campaign, he garnered nearly 16 million votes. Khamenei installed him as head of Iran’s internationally criticized judiciary, long known for its closed-door trials of human rights activists and those with Western ties. In 2019, the US Treasury sanctioned Raisi “for his administrative oversight of the executions of persons who were minors at the time of the crime and of the torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners in Iran, including amputations.”
In 2021, Raisi became the dominant figure in the elections after a panel led by Khamenei disqualified candidates who posed the biggest challenge to his protégé. He received nearly 62% of the 28.9 million votes in that vote, the lowest percentage share in the history of the Islamic Republic. Millions of people stayed home and others canceled their votes.
Raisi was defiant when asked at a news conference after his election about the 1988 executions, which involved false retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions.”
After Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire, members of Saddam Hussein’s heavily armed Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq stormed across the Iranian border. from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran mitigated its attack.
Trials began around that time and defendants were asked to identify themselves. Those who responded as “mujahideen” were sent to their deaths, while others were interrogated about their willingness to “clear minefields for the army of the Islamic Republic,” according to a 1990 Amnesty International report. International rights groups They estimate that about 5,000 people were executed. Raisi was part of the commissions.
“I am proud to be a defender of human rights and the safety and comfort of people as a prosecutor wherever I am,” Raisi said.
Born in Mashhad on December 14, 1960, Raisi was born into a family whose lineage traces back to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, marked by the black turban he would later wear. His father died when he was five years old. He entered the seminary in the Shiite holy city of Qom and would later describe himself as an ayatollah, a high-ranking Shiite cleric.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
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