The incident has sparked reactions within Iran, and the potential consequences are being analyzed.
Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday, was a major figure in Iran for many years. He was even considered a likely candidate to become Iran’s supreme leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Raisi was born in 1960 into a religious family in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city. He started studying religion at the Qom seminary when he was just 15 years old.
Raisi was only 18 when the Islamic Republic was formed after the 1979 revolution. He quickly rose through the ranks of power. He first became the prosecutor general of Karaj, a city near Tehran, and later became the deputy prosecutor for the entire capital.
After Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in 1989, Raisi was put in charge of the Tehran prosecutor’s office.
In 1988, Iran was facing internal unrest and a war with Iraq. To deal with the situation, Khomeini ordered a harsh crackdown on people who disagreed with the government and political prisoners.
Khomeini put Raisi on a committee that decided whether prisoners were disloyal to the government and should be executed. According to Amnesty International, a human rights organization, at least 5,000 political prisoners were executed based on the committee’s decisions.
Many people who oppose the Islamic Republic call this committee the “death commission.” Raisi was known for his role in this committee, which led to accusations of human rights violations. The United States even imposed sanctions on him because of it.
After Khamenei became Iran’s second supreme leader in 1989, Raisi continued to climb the ranks in Iran’s legal system. After being prosecutor in Tehran, he led the country’s inspection organization for ten years. He then spent another ten years as the prosecutor general of the Special Court for the Clergy in Iran.
From 2004 to 2014, Raisi was the first deputy to the chief justice. During this time, he played a key role in putting down protests that broke out after the 2009 presidential election.
Raisi was also a member of the Assembly of Experts, a group that chooses the next supreme leader after the current one dies. He was a close friend of Khamenei and, in 2016, Khamenei put him in charge of the shrine of the 8th Shiite Imam in Mashhad. This position gave him control over a lot of money.
Raisi ran for president in 2017. He was very critical of the current president, Hassan Rouhani, who was considered more moderate. He also criticized the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and Western countries. He lost the election to Rouhani.
Despite the loss, Raisi remained a powerful figure. In February 2019, Khamenei appointed him as the head of the Iranian judiciary.
Raisi ran for president again in 2021. Many of his strongest opponents were disqualified before the election. Rouhani couldn’t run again because of term limits. Only about 50% of the people voted, and Raisi won by a big margin.
Raisi was president for less than three years. During his time in office, the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests were violently put down across Iran. At least 500 people died, thousands were arrested, and seven people were executed for their involvement in the protests.
In March 2024, a UN investigation concluded that Iran had committed crimes against humanity during the crackdown. These crimes included murder, torture, and rape.
Raisi publicly supported the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023. During his presidency, Iran launched a direct attack on Israel for the first time on April 15, 2024, using over 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones, and more than 30 cruise missiles. This attack was in response to an earlier strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in early April, which killed seven people, including a high-ranking commander and his deputy.
Raisi was a major player in Iran’s political system. Many people believed that he, along with Mojtaba Khamenei (the 55-year-old son of Ali Khamenei), were the most likely candidates to become the next supreme leader of Iran.
(Views expressed in the article are of author’s own and do not reflect the editorial stance of Business Upturn)
