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.