Topline
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, an ultra-conservative with a history of atrocity accusations who was widely considered a potential future supreme leader of Iran, was confirmed dead Monday after a helicopter transporting him and several other government officials crashed in a rural area of the country due to fog and bad weather, state news agencies reported.
Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi.
Key Facts
A search for a missing helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials lasted more than 12 hours before wreckage was found in the country’s northwest region, near Iran’s border with Azerbaijan, state news media reported.
Raisi assumed the presidency in 2021 following an election that was widely protested over claims it was rigged in favor of the conservative, who was ultimately victorious with 62% of the votes cast (it was the lowest turnout for an Iranian election in four decades).
Raisi was a political ally to Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and most powerful political and religious authority in Iran, and the president had been largely seen as a likely successor to the position.
While president, Raisi worked to expand Iran's influence in the Middle East while governing through a severe economic crisis and a historic escalation of the country’s conflict with Israel, which recently put the countries on the brink of war.
Enforcement of Iran’s "hijab and chastity law" sharply increased under Raisi’s administration—he faced massive anti-government protests around the deaths of Mahsa Amini and Armita Geravand, both of whom died after allegedly violating the hijab law—and the country’s has restricted women’s rights to sexual and reproductive healthcare in attempts to raise the population.
Raisi was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2019 after the Treasury Department accused him of participating in decades of human rights violations, including the execution of children in Iran, imprisonment of prominent human rights lawyers and executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.
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Who Is Leading Iran?
Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, will serve as acting president. A leadership council that includes the speaker of parliament and the head of the judiciary has 50 days to arrange for an election for a new president.
Key Background
Raisi, 63, was a religious scholar who started to rise up in the government after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which toppled the country’s monarchy and established a new political system based on Islamic, or Sharia, law. Since the revolution, women have been largely banned from higher education institutions, the marriage age was lowered to 9 for girls (it was raised to 13 in 2002) and tens of thousands of political prisoners have been executed, many of them while Raisi worked in the country’s judiciary. Raisi served as the prosecutor general of Tehran between 1989 and 1994, when he earned the nickname "Butcher of Tehran." He participated in a so-called death commission that ordered the executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. He was then appointed as chair of the General Inspection Office, which oversees the legality of the government, in 1994 before moving up the ranks of the judicial system to ultimately become the country's chief justice. Raisi ran for president in 2017 and lost before being elected in 2021.
Tangent
The "Woman Life Freedom" uprising that began in September of 2022 took place under Raisi’s administration. The campaign was sparked by the death of Amini, who died in police custody after she was arrested for not wearing the hijab. The phrase became a rallying cry that echoed around the world and the main slogan of mass protests that have led to the deaths of hundreds in Iran and imprisonment of thousands more. The use of the death penalty to instill fear in the aftermath of the "Woman Life Freedom" uprising has been condemned and studied by human rights organizations, including an Amnesty International report titled "’Don’t Let Them Kill Us’: Iran’s Relentless Execution Crisis Since the 2022 Uprising." Last year, Iran recorded 853 executions, the highest in a single year since 2015.
