An Iranian woman holds a poster of President Ebrahim Raisi during a mourning ceremony for him at Vali-e-Asr square in downtown Tehran, Iran, Monday, May 20, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Ebrahim Raisi, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a hardline cleric who many saw as a successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, died in a helicopter crash in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran near the Azerbaijan border on May 19.

His death, along with those of Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and a few other officials, comes after Tehran launched a sizeable missile and drone attack on Israeli territory in April that was in retaliation of an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders.

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A man whose lineage could be traced back to the Prophet Muhammed, Mr. Raisi rose through the ranks of Iran’s Shi’ite Muslim clergy and claimed key positions in the country’s judiciary before winning the 2021 Presidential election, which helped consolidate all power under the conservatives loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mr. Raisi’s 85-year-old mentor.

Mr. Raisi’s time as President was marked by with escalating regional tensions within the Middle East, stalled talks on the revival of a nuclear deal with world powers and the anti-government protests that swept across Iran in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini.

Many Iranians and human rights activists have called for an investigation into his alleged role in the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988 as a part of the four-man “Death Commissions.”

Here is a brief look at the life of Ebrahim Raisi:

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died after his helicopter crashed in the mountains yesterday. Raisi was in line to be Iran’s next supreme leader, along with a clampdown on morality questions.

Raisi’s hardline position had been all pervasive in domestic politics while he governed through a severe economic crisis and a historic escalation of the country’s conflict with Israel.

Raisi took over as president in 2021, succeeding the moderate Hassan Rouhani, for a term marked by crisis and conflict.

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 that authorities tighten the enforcement of Iran’s “hijab and chastity law” restricting women’s attire and behaviour.

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 flouting dress rules for women.

The nationwide protests presented one of the gravest challenges to Iran’s clerical rulers since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Hundreds were killed, according to rights groups, including dozens of security personnel who were part of a fierce crackdown on the demonstrators as the president insisted “acts of chaos are unacceptable.”

Why Raisi Was Labelled ‘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 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran.

Inquisitions known as “death committees” were set up across Iran, comprising 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 by Amnesty International.

While the number of people killed across Iran was never confirmed, Amnesty said minimum estimates put it at 5,000.

The 1988 mass execution earned him the dubious soubriquet of ‘The Butcher of Tehran’.

Iran-Israel Tensions

The Gaza war sent regional tensions soaring again and a series of tit-for-tat escalations led to Tehran launching hundreds of missiles and rockets directly at Israel in April this year.

Raisi recently emphasised Iran’s support for Palestinians, a centrepiece 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,” said Raisi.

A Conservative Hardliner

Ebrahim Raisi, 63, rose through Iran’s theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president, overseeing a crackdown on protests at home and pushing hard in nuclear talks with world powers.

Raisi’s career started in the years after the 1979 Islamic revolution. He was close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Like Khamenei, Raisi often spoke up defiantly as Iran, the biggest Shiite Muslim power, was locked in a tense standoff with its declared arch foes the United States and Israel. Raisi has been on Washington’s sanctions blacklist for complicity in “serious human rights violations”.

Raisi took a tough stance in the nuclear negotiations, seeing a chance to win broad relief from US sanctions in return for only modest curbs on Iran’s increasingly advanced technology.

In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump had reneged on the deal Tehran had made with the six powers and restored harsh US sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to progressively violate the agreement’s nuclear limits.

Indirect talks between Tehran and US President Joe Biden’s administration to revive the deal have stalled.