Ebrahim Raisi, the hardline Iranian president, who has been killed in a helicopter crash aged 63, was a former judge whose blatantly rigged election in 2021 was a rout for the reformist camp represented by the outgoing president Hassan Rouhani, who had advocated re-engagement with the West.
An austere-looking man who sported a grey beard and black turban (a sign of descent from the prophet Muhammad), Raisi was a disciple of his country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei; he was a loyal apparatchik who rose quickly through the ranks of the judiciary after the Islamic Revolution, developing close ties to Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In 1988 Raisi, then a 28-year-old deputy prosecutor general, was said to have been one of the prosecutors on a four-man “death commission” in Tehran that “retried” prisoners in jail for political crimes and ordered the extrajudicial execution of thousands of dissidents.
This reign of terror came after Ayatollah Khomeini, Khamenei’s predecessor as Supreme Leader, had accepted the ceasefire in the war with Saddam Hussein, a setback which he regarded as “a cup of poison”, and an attack from Iraq by rebel Iranian mujahideen.
The exact number killed is unclear, but estimates range from 3,000 to as many as 30,000, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson saying of this reign of terror: “It bears some comparison to the death marches of allied prisoners at the end of the Second World War.” Most were supporters of the main democratic opposition movement, and although Raisi denied involvement, the killings earned him the nickname the “Butcher of Tehran”.
Raisi’s theological credentials were middling, but after styling himself as an ayatollah, he was recognised by Khamenei as being one rank below. His unswerving loyalty and willingness to follow orders qualified him to join Iran’s Assembly of Experts, the deliberative body empowered to appoint the Supreme Leader of Iran, in 2006.
In 2017 his behind-the-scenes rise took a public turn when he ran in presidential elections against Hassan Rouhani. Although he lost, his public profile was enhanced, and in 2019 Ayatollah Khamenei appointed him chief justice, a position in which Raisi oversaw a brutal crackdown of dissidents following protests in November 2019, but was able to acquire some populist credentials with an anti-corruption drive.
President Rouhani had advocated re-engagement with the West, but failed to deliver economic renewal after Donald Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal in 2018. On the campaign trail in 2021, Raisi travelled widely to hear the grievances of the poor, blaming Rouhani and his so-called moderate faction for Iran’s desperate economic straits and weakness in the face of Western sanctions.
His election by a landslide in June 2021 was marred by low turnout amid voter anger at what many saw as egregious rigging – any moderate or reformist candidates had been disqualified by the hardline Guardian Council. Although he won 62 per cent of votes cast, turnout was 48.8 per cent – a record low.
His election saw anti-Western conservatives in control of all branches of power for the first time in a decade and Raisi set about steering Iran back towards the uncompromising beliefs of the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary founders.
He ordered a tightening of morality laws and signalled an increasingly confrontational stance towards the West by supporting the country’s enrichment of uranium for nuclear reactors, as well as hampering international inspectors.
His most challenging issue in office was the mass protest movement that swept through the country in late 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly breaching Iran’s strict Islamic dress code for women.
With protesters demanding an end to the rule of the clerical establishment, Raisi ordered Iran’s security forces to suppress dissent with force. UN estimates suggest that as many as 551 protesters were killed and another 20,000 arrested.
Abroad during Raisi’s presidency, Iran set about exacerbating tensions across the Middle East via its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, tensions that seemed to have reached crisis point when on April 13 this year Tehran sent a barrage of more than 300 drones and missiles into Israel, supposedly in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus on April 1.
The attack had been widely briefed in advance, however, with the result that nearly all the missiles were shot down and a retaliatory attack by Israel was quickly played down by Iran; the oil market remained unruffled.
For despite the leadership’s posturing, the fact remains that Iran cannot afford all-out war because its economy has been crippled by six years of double-digit inflation and more than a decade of sanctions, compounded under Raisi by the Covid pandemic, which hit Iran harder than any other country in the Middle East.
The son of a cleric, Ebrahim Raisi was born on December 14 1960 in Mashdad, Iran’s second city. His father died when he was five and he followed in his footsteps, travelling to Qom aged15 to attend a Shia seminary.
In 1979, still a student, he joined the mass protests against the Shah that led to the Islamic Revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini.
After taking a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence and law, Raisi began his career in 1981 as the 21-year-old prosecutor of Karaj and Hamadan provinces, before moving to Tehran as a deputy city prosecutor in 1985, aged just 25. It was in this role, according to human-rights groups, that he served on the “death committee” in 1988.
As deputy chief justice between 2004 and 2014, Raisi backed the brutal crackdowns and mass incarcerations that ended months of public protests triggered by the disputed presidential election of 2009. In 2014 he was appointed the country’s prosecutor general, and in 2019 he was placed under sanctions by the US Treasury for his role in domestic repression.
Raisi’s rise to the presidency prompted speculation that he might eventually succeed the 85-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader. Khamenei himself had served as president in the 1980s before replacing the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1989.
On Sunday, Raisi was travelling in a convoy of three helicopters in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province when his helicopter suffered a “hard landing”. His body and that of the foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian were found in the wreckage in the early hours of Monday.
Raisi married, in 1983, Jamileh, the daughter of Ahmad Alamolhoda, a well-connected Friday prayer leader of Mashhad. They had two children.
Ebrahim Raisi, born December 14 1960, died May 19 2024
