Dubai: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line protg of the country’s supreme leader who helped oversee the mass executions of thousands in 1988 and later led the country as it enriched uranium near weapons-grade levels and launched a major drone-and-missile attack on Israel, has died. He was 63.
Raisi’s unforeseen death, along with that of Iran’s foreign minister and other officers in the copter crash Sunday in northwestern Iran, came as Iran struggles with internal dissent and its relations with the wider world.
A clergyperson first, Raisi formerly kissed the Quran, the Islamic holy book, before the United Nations and spoke more like a dominie than a statesman when addressing the world.
Raisi, who before lost a presidential election to the fairly moderately peremptory Hassan Rouhani in 2017, ended up coming to power four times, latterly in a vote precisely managed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to clear any major opposition seeker.
His appearance came after Rouhani’s nuclear deal with world powers remained in tatters after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord, setting in motion a motion a stir of renewed pressure between Tehran and Washington.
But while saying he wanted to return the deal, Raisi’s new administration rather pushed back against transnational examinations, in part over an ongoing suspected sabotage crusade carried out by Israel targeting its nuclear program. Addresses in Vienna aimed at restoring the accord remained stalled in his government’s first months. Warrants are the US’ new way of war with the nations of the world, Raisi told the United Nations in September 2021.
He added The policy of maximum oppression’ is still on. We want nothing more than what’s rightfully ours. Mass demurrers swept the country in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been detained over allegedly not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the relish of authorities. The monthslong security crackdown that followed the demonstrations killed more than 500 people and more than 22,000 others were detained.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel set up that Iran was responsible for the physical violence that led to Amini’s death. also came the 2023 Israel- Hamas war, in which Iranian- backed regulars targeted Israel. Tehran launched an extraordinary attack itself on Israel in April, in which hundreds of drones, voyage dumdums and ballistic dumdums were fired.
Israel, the US and its abettors shot down the shells, but it showed just how important the yearslong shadow war between Iran and Israel had boiled. Khamenei appointed Raisi, a former Iranian attorney general, in 2016 to run the Imam Reza charity foundation, which manages a empire of businesses and bents in Iran. It’s one of numerous bonyads, or charitable foundations, fuelled by donations or means seized after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These foundations offer no public account of their spending and answer only to Iran’s supreme leader. The Imam Reza charity, known as Astan- e Quds- e Razavi in Farsi, is believed to be one of the biggest. Judges estimate its worth at knockouts of billions of bones as it owns nearly half the land in Mashhad, Iran’s alternate- largest megacity.
At Raisi’s appointment to the foundation, Khamenei called him a secure person with high- profile experience. That led to critic enterprise that Khamenei could be fixing Raisi as a possible seeker to be Iran’s third- ever supreme leader, a Shiite clergyperson who has the final say-so on all state matters and serves as the country’s commander- in- chief.
Though Raisi lost his 2017 crusade, he still garnered nearly 16 million votes. Khamenei installed him as the head of Iran’s internationally criticised bar, long known for its unrestricted- door trials of mortal rights activists and those with Western ties. The US Treasury in 2019 sanctioned Raisi for his executive oversight over the prosecutions of individualities who were kids at the time of their crime and the torture and other cruel, inhuman, or demeaning treatment or discipline of captures in Iran, including amputations.
By 2021, Raisi came the dominant figure in the election after a panel under Khamenei disqualified campaigners who posed the topmost challenge to his protege. He swept nearly 62 per cent of the28.9 million votes in that vote, the smallest turnout by chance in the Islamic Republic’s history. Millions stayed home and others voided ballots.
Raisi was recalcitrant when asked at a news conference after his election about the 1988 prosecutions, which saw sham retrials of political captures, zealots and others that would come known as death commissions.
After Iran’s also- Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted aUN-brokered check-fire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran cauterized their assault.
The trials began around that time, with defendants asked to identify themselves. Those who responded mujahedeen were transferred to their deaths, while others were questioned about their amenability to clear minefields for the army of the Islamic Republic, according to a 1990 Amnesty International report.
transnational rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed. Raisi served on the commissions. I’m proud of being a protector of mortal rights and of people’s security and comfort as a prosecutor wherever I am, Raisi said. Born in Mashhad on December 14, 1960, Raisi was born into a family that traces its lineage to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, as marked by the black turban he’d lately worn. His father failed when he was 5. He’d go to the seminary in the Shiite holy megacity of Qom and later describe himself as an ayatollah, a high-ranking Shiite clergyperson. He’s survived by his wife and two daughters.
