Iran named on Tuesday a former Revolutionary Guards commander to succeed Ali Larijani as head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council after the veteran insider of the Islamic system was killed in an Israeli strike.
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, whose appointment was confirmed by state TV, is a former deputy commander-in-chief of Iran’s ideological army who has also held senior posts in the interior and justice ministries.
Larijani was killed last week in an Israeli strike, ending the life of one of the most heavyweight non-clerical figures in Iranian politics who had been seen as a possible pointman in any eventual talks with the United States.
Zolghadr’s career has been embedded in the Revolutionary Guards, whose stated aim is to protect the Islamic revolution from internal and external threats.
After serving in the 1980s war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Zolghadr was the head of the Guards joint staff for eight years, and then as the deputy commander-in-chief of the Guards for another eight years.
In 2005, he was named deputy interior minister for security and police in the government of then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a move that was seen at the time as bolstering the Guards’ influence in politics.
Since 2023, he had been the secretary of the Expediency Council, a powerful body which plays both an advisory and mediating role between Iran’s various power structures and the supreme leader.
His new post should give Zolghadr a major role in the Iranian war effort against the United States and Israeli strikes after the killing of over dozen key Iranian security figures in the war.
However, the current leadership structures in Tehran remain murky after the killing of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his successor and son Mojtaba yet to appear in public.
Zolghadr is formally appointed by President Masoud Pezeshkian but the president’s deputy communications director Mehdi Tabatabaei wrote on X that the nomination had been approved by Mojtaba Khamenei.
