Ebrahim Raisi (14 December 1960-19 May 2024) was President of Iran from 3 August 2021 to 19 May 2024, succeeding Hassan Rouhani and preceding Mohammad Mokhber. Raisi acquired a reputation as a conservative cleric with a hardline agenda, having served as Chief of the Judiciary and presided over a long list of human rights violations, especially the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988. He was killed in a helicopter crash in East Azerbaijan in 2024.
Biography[]
Raisi in 1980
Ebrahim Raisi was born in Mashhad, Iran in 1960 to a family of Shia Muslim clerics. He received a limited religious education before becoming the prosecutor of Karaj in 1981; he was concurrently appointed prosecutor of Hamadan, and he became deputy prosecutor of Tehran in 1985. Raisi was nicknamed "the Executioner" for overseeing the 1988 executions of between 2,800 and 30,000+ political prisoners, the majority of whom were from the People's Mujahedin of Iran, while others came from the Organization of Iranian People's Fedaian and Tudeh. Following Ayatollah Khomeini's death and Ali Khamenei's election as Supreme Leader of Iran, Raisi was appointed Tehran prosecutor, serving from 1989 to 1994. He also served as First Deputy Chief Justice of Iran from 2004 to 2014, Attorney General from 2014 to 2016, and chairman of the Astan Quds Razavi charity from 2016. Raisi ran for President in 2017, but he lost to incumbent President Hassan Rouhani and, rather than congratulate Rouhani on his victory, he asked the Guardian Council to look into "violations of the law". In 2021, however, Raisi won a blatantly rigged presidential election in which only 48.8% of Iranians voted, with 62% of the vote going to Raisi; this occurred after just 7 men out of a pool of 600 candidates (including 40 females) were allowed to proceed by the Guardian Council and three candidates pulled out before election day. Most of the candidates in the election congratulated Raisi on his victory before the votes were even counted, subtly protesting the fradulent election.
Raisi's presidency saw a deadlock in negotiations with America over the Iran nuclear deal, as well as the government's savage suppression of the feminist Mahsa Amini protests in late 2022. He also oversaw Iran's intensified uranium enrichment, hindering of international inspections, and support for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, supplying Russia with Shahed drones and other munitions. After Hamas' surprise attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Raisi supported Hamas in the Israel-Hamas War, launching missile and drone attacks on Israel in April 2024 and arming Hezbollah and the Houthis to fight against Israel and its Western backers.
On 19 May 2024, while returning from a dam dedication in Azerbaijan, he, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Governor of East Azerbaijan Malek Rahmati, and Supreme Leader Representative in East Azerbaijan Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem went missing when their helicopter crashed in Varzaqan, East Azerbaijan while traveling in foggy weather. Due to the frigid weather conditions in the mountains, the threat posed by wild animals, and the "hard landing" nature of the crash, many news outlets stated that Raisi was likely already dead, even as multinational search efforts continued.