Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and other officials were killed in a helicopter crash in mountainous terrain near the Azerbaijan border, officials and state media announced Monday.
The death of Iran’s president is not expected to upend Iran’s domestic or foreign politics. But it does come at a time of raised international tensions and it is likely to increase speculation over who will eventually replace Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Raisi was viewed as a possible successor to the 85-year-old cleric.
Raisi, 63, and Amirabdollahian, 60, were traveling from Iran’s border with Azerbaijan in the country’s mountainous northwest to the city of Tabriz after inaugurating a joint dam project when their helicopter went down in a remote area Sunday. It’s not immediately clear what caused the crash. The officials had been missing for over 12 hours and search operations were hindered by fog, blizzards and difficult terrain through the night.
Developments
∎ Mohammad Mokhber, Iran’s vice president, was appointed acting president; Ali Bagheri Kani, was named acting foreign minister, according to Iran’s state media.
∎ Raisi was traveling in a convoy of three helicopters. It appears to have gotten into difficulties in heavy fog. Raisi’s helicopter was the only one that failed to reach its destination. Raisi and the rest of his traveling party were flying in a U.S.-made Bell 212 helicopter. Iran has not commented on any investigation into the crash.
∎ Iran’s Red Crescent published video footage showing rescue teams recovering bodies from the crash site.
∎ The death of Iran’s president and its top diplomat deprives the country of two senior politicians at a time when Iran, and the broader region, is on edge because of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and recent direct military exchanges between Iran and Israel that risked sparking a wider regional war. Domestically, Iran’s theocratic government has been facing anger over corruption, its sanctions-hit economy and calls for an end to clerical rule.
∎ World leaders started sharing their reactions. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “deeply saddened and shocked.” European Council President Charles Michel said the EU “expressed its sincere condolences” to the families of all those killed. There was no immediate statement from the White House.
What happens now?
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has the final say on all major policy decisions.
However, according to Iran’s constitution, the vice president takes over if the president is not able to execute his duties because of illness or death. That means that power will be transferred to Mohammad Mokhber.
Mokhber, 68, has been Raisi’s No. 2 since the election in 2021 that handed Raisi the presidency.
Mokhber is close to Khamenei, and like Raisi is a politically conservative hardliner when it comes issues such as violating “morality” laws, clampdowns on protests and nuclear talks with the West.
Mokhber will take over the presidency on an interim basis. New elections must be called within 50 days and Mokhber will be part of a three-person council tasked with organizing Iran’s next national vote.
“Real alternatives to Iran’s hardliners have simply not been allowed to stand for office in the in the last few elections,” said Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and the co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank.
Who was Ebrahim Raisi?
Ebrahim Raisi ascended to the presidency after heading Iran’s judiciary.
He rose through the ranks to be Iran’s top legal official after working as a prosecutor assigned to cases connected to the Iran-Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988.
Activists started calling Raisi the “Butcher of Tehran” because he was one of four judges who allegedly oversaw the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners. Iran has never acknowledged these alleged killings, which Human Rights Watch estimates saw between 2,800 to 5,000 people executed.
“As deputy prosecutor general of Tehran, Raisi participated in a so-called ‘death commission’ that ordered the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988,” the U.S. Treasury Department said in a 2019 sanctions notice. When asked about the killings in 2021, Raisi described himself as a “defender of human rights.”
What do we know about the cause of the crash?
Not a lot.
There’s a tendency in Iran to blame Israel, its chief regional enemy, whenever there is an unexplained accident or death of a public security or nuclear official in Iran.
Tehran has so far been silent on this point.
However, Israeli officials have already been anonymously briefing reporters there Monday, saying “it wasn’t us.”
And Javad Zarif, a former Iranian foreign minister, also tried to blame the U.S.
Zarif told state media in Iran that the U.S. was one of the main culprits of the crash because of its repeated sanctions on Iran. Raisi and his traveling party were flying in a U.S.-made Bell 212 helicopter.
Iran’s isolation from the world has long left it with one of the oldest civil-aviation fleets in the world and it has facilitated a fatal trend in its aviation-safety record. Western manufacturers, under the sanctions, are prohibited from selling planes and even crucial spare parts to Iran. What’s not known is whether the U.S.-made Bell 212 crashed because of lack of access to spare parts or some other technical maintenance issue.
