Ebrahim Raisi has been president since 2021
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died yesterday after his helicopter crashed in the mountains. Raisi was on track to be Iran’s next supreme leader, along with a crackdown on morality issues.
Raisi’s hard-line stance was present in domestic politics as he governed during a serious economic crisis and a historic escalation of the country’s conflict with Israel.
Raisi assumed the presidency in 2021, succeeding the moderate Hassan Rouhani, for a term marked by crises and conflicts.
Return of Morality Police
Raisi was personally involved in two of the darkest periods of Iranian repression.
A year after his election, the mid-ranking cleric ordered authorities to strengthen enforcement of Iran’s “hijab and chastity law,” which restricts women’s dress and behavior.
Iran saw a wave of protests triggered by the death in custody of Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, in September 2022, after her arrest for allegedly violating dress code rules for women.
The nationwide protests represented one of the most serious challenges to Iran’s clerical rulers since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Hundreds of people were killed, rights groups said, including dozens of security officers who were part of a fierce crackdown on protesters, as the president insisted that “acts of chaos are unacceptable.”
Why Raisi Was Labeled ‘The Butcher of Tehran’
For Iran’s exiled opposition and human rights groups, Raise’s name evoked mass executions of Marxists and other leftists in 1988, when he was deputy prosecutor at the Revolutionary Court in Tehran.
Inquisitions known as “death commissions” were created across Iran, made up of religious judges, prosecutors and intelligence ministry officials who decided the fate of thousands of detainees in arbitrary trials that lasted just a few minutes, according to a report. of Amnesty International.
Although the number of people killed across Iran has never been confirmed, Amnesty says minimum estimates put it at 5,000.
The 1988 mass execution earned him the dubious nickname “The Butcher of Tehran.”
Iran-Israel tensions
The Gaza war caused regional tensions to rise again and a series of retaliatory escalations led Tehran to launch hundreds of missiles and rockets directly at Israel in April this year.
Raisi recently emphasized Iran’s support for the Palestinians, a centerpiece of its foreign policy since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
“We believe that Palestine is the first issue of the Muslim world and we are convinced that the people of Iran and Azerbaijan always support the people of Palestine and Gaza and hate the Zionist regime,” Raisi said.
A hard-line conservative
Ebrahim Raisi, 63, rose through the Iranian theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president, overseeing the country’s crackdown on protests and pushing hard for nuclear negotiations with world powers.
Raisi’s career began in the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution. He was close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Like Khamenei, Raisi often spoke defiantly as Iran, the largest Shiite Muslim power, found itself in a tense standoff with its sworn arch-enemies, the United States and Israel. Raisi is on Washington’s sanctions blacklist for complicity in “serious human rights violations.”
Raisi has taken a tough stance in the nuclear negotiations, seeing an opportunity to win broad relief from U.S. sanctions in exchange for only modest restrictions on Iran’s increasingly advanced technology.
In 2018, then US President Donald Trump reneged on the agreement that Tehran had made with the six powers and restored tough US sanctions on Iran, leading Tehran to progressively violate the nuclear limits of the agreement.
Indirect negotiations between Tehran and US President Joe Biden’s administration to revive the agreement have stalled.
This story originally appeared on Ndtv.com read the full story
