Iran, a Shiite theocracy on the Arabian Peninsula, suffered a mortal blow early last week when an helicopter in which President Ebrahim Raisi was travelling crashed, pulling him down to a fiery death along with some other top Iranian officials.
Raisi was on Sunday, 19th May, returning from a ceremony at which he and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev inaugurated a dam at the border region of Iran and Azerbaijan when the American-made Bell 212 helicopter conveying the Iranian president slammed into a mountain peak amidst thick fog, killing him and all others on board including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. The charred wreckage of the helicopter carrying eight passengers and crew was found early on Monday after an overnight search in blizzard conditions. Besides Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian, others who died in the crash were the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, a senior cleric from the Iranian city of Tabriz, an official of Iran’s elite Guardian Council and three crew members, according to state-run agency IRNA, which is the only outlet for news in the authoritarian state.
Although the crash caused the death of lynchpins of the Iranian state, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the government remained steady and state running business-as-usual while the crash victims were being mourned – he announced five days of national mourning. On the heels of confirmation of the deaths early on Monday, he named first vice-president, Mohammad Mokhber, as caretaker leader in line with the constitution of Iran that stipulates calling a new presidential poll within 50 days. Ali Bagheri Kani was named interim foreign minister. The state news agency said fresh presidential election would hold on Friday, 28th June, with candidates to be registered between 30th May and 3rd June.
Iran disclosed no cause for the crash nor suggested that sabotage was involved, but conspiracy theorists fingered Israel with which Iran has been in long-drawn mutual hostility. The United States as well got blamed because while Iran has flown Bell helicopters extensively since the era of the Shah, aircraft in the country face shortages of spare parts owing in part to Western sanctions, and they often fly without safety checks. It was against that backdrop a former Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, argued that the U.S. was culpable in the crash. He was repotted saying in an interview: “One of the main culprits of (the) tragedy is the United States, which embargoed the sale of aircraft and aviation parts to Iran and does not allow the people of Iran to enjoy good aviation facilities. This will be recorded in the list of U.S.’s crimes against the Iranian people.”
An ultraconservative cleric who formerly headed Iran’s judiciary, Raisi, 63, was widely seen as a protégé and likely successor to Khamenei – a hardcore hardliner who has the final word in Iranian affairs and is the de facto head of state. Khamenei has been supreme leader since 1989, but aged 85, he has suffered health challenges in recent years and the question of who replaces him as supreme leader upon death or retirement has gotten more topical in Iran. Raisi was touted as the likely candidate, the only other potential mentioned being Khamenei’s 55-year-old son and mid-level cleric, Mojtaba Khamenei. But analysts argued that Mojtaba succeeding his father would mark a shift from the principles of the Islamic republic, which overthrew the Shah dynasty in an Islamic revolution 1979 and has since prided itself on shaking off hereditary rule. So, with Raisi’s death, the succession plot is up in the air.
Raisi came to power in 2021 through an election whose outcome many saw as engineered because moderate and reformist candidates were blocked from contesting, just to favour hardliners, and with voter turnout being the lowest in the Islamic republic’s history. By the laws of the Persian Gulf country, a powerful 12-member body, the Guardian Council charged with overseeing elections and legislation, screens candidates for presidential elections and pre-vets membership of an 88-member assembly of mullahs that determines succession to the supreme leader position. Raisi until his death sat in the assembly of mullahs that has gotten increasingly hardline over the years: he won re-election to the body last March.
The hardline disposition of leadership characterises the conduct of the Iranian state. Under Raisi, Iran’s ties with the West nosedived as the country enriched uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels. The country supplied bomb-carrying drones to Russia for its war on Ukraine, and fuelled proxy wars through sustained moral and material support for the “axis of resistance” of political and military groups like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Meanwhile, Iran’s leadership faced years of internal uprising by Iranians over the country’s economy that has been laid prostrate by Western sanctions. There were as well virulent protests over women’s rights, the most recent following the 2022 death in security agents’ custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was detained over her allegedly inappropriate hijab dress code. Months-long security crackdown against demonstrations over the death of Amini killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained. In March, a United Nations investigative panel found the Iranian leadership culpable for Amini’s death.
Beyond its borders, Iran has had a combative reputation in the Middle-East. The country over the years provided financial and other forms of support to Palestinian militant group, Hamas, which staged the 7th October attack on Israel that triggered the yet ongoing Gaza war. While there is no that evidence Iran was directly involved in the 7th October attack, its leaders voiced solidarity with the Palestinians. The country’s allies in the region have gone much further: Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group has waged a low-intensity conflict with Israel since the start of the Gaza war, with the two sides trading strikes on near-daily basis along the Israel-Lebanon border, forcing tens of thousands of people on both sides to flee. So far, though, the conflict has not boiled over into a full-blown war that would be disastrous for both countries. Also, Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq launched repeated attacks on U.S. bases in the opening months of the war but pulled back after U.S. retaliatory strikes for a drone attack that killed three American soldiers in January. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, another ally of Iran, have repeatedly targeted international shipping in what they touted as a blockade of Israel. Their strikes, which often target ships with no apparent link to Israel, have also drawn U.S.-led retaliation.
Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and Israel never before reached as high as they were in April when Iran under Raisi and Supreme Leader Khamenei launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel, in response to an airstrike on an Iranian Consulate in Syria that killed two Iranian generals and five officers. Israel, with the help of the United States, Britain, Jordan and others intercepted nearly all the projectiles. In apparent retaliation, Israel has launched its own strike against an air defense radar system in the Iranian city of Isfahan, causing no casualties but sending an obvious message. The sides have waged a shadow war of covert operations and cyberattacks for years, but the exchange of fire in April was their first direct military confrontation. Speculations that Raisi’s death could be an extension of this confrontation are highly moot because while Israel is believed to have carried out attacks over the years targeting senior Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists, there is yet no evidence linking it with the helicopter crash.
Iran’s potential stretches beyond the Middle East. Western countries – just like Israel – have long suspected the Islamic republic of pursuing nuclear weapons in the guise of a peaceful atomic program – a pursuit they regard as a threat to global non-proliferation. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from a nuclear pact between Iran and world powers in 2018, and his imposition of crushing sanctions, led to Iran gradually abandoning all limits placed on its program by the deal. Surveillance cameras installed by the UN nuclear agency have been obstructed, while Iran has barred some of the agency’s most experienced inspectors. The country always insisted its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes, but the U.S. and other nations suspect it has an active nuclear weapons program. In that, it might be simply aiming to match Israel, which is widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed power in the Mid-east though it has never acknowledged having such weapons.
After Raisi, not much will change in the nationhood character of Iran. The levers of power repose effectively with Khamenei and the Guardian Council, and these are core conservatives in disposition. Iran as we know it will continue business-as-usual.
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