Mohammad Bagher Zolqadr | Ascent of the Guardsman

When Hamas launched its cross-border attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing at least 1,200 people, Mohammad Bagher Zolqadr, then Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, called it a “turning point” for Palestinians. “This operation is the starting point of the fall of the Zionist regime,” he said. The chain of events triggered by the attack has now led to a full-blown Israeli-American war on Iran. The conflict has brought the 72-year-old former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to the centre of Iran’s security decision-making.

After the U.S. and Israel launched the war on February 28, by killing Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, and several other leaders, Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, emerged as the face of the Iranian state and defiance. Larijani was already one of the most powerful men in the Islamic Republic. A ‘principalist’ himself who had close ties to Ali Khamenei, Larijani was an inflluential ink between Iran’s military establishment and its political class. On March 17, Larijani was assassinated by an Israeli air strike. Seven days later, President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed Mr. Zolqadr as Larijani’s successor. As Secretary of the Security Council, he is expected to play a significant role in key security decision-making at a time when the state is fighting a war of survival.

Mr. Zolqadr belongs to a generation of Guardsmen associated with the ‘Mansouroun’ network, an Islamist militant organisation which contributed influential figures to the IRGC such as Mohsen Rezaei, Ali Shamkhani and Gholam Ali Rashid.

After the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah’s monarchy, Mr. Zolqadr joined one of the revolutionary committees. After Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, backed by Persian Gulf monarchies, invaded Iran in 1980, Mr. Zolqadr, like many of his comrades in Mansouroun, joined the Ramadan Headquarters, which was in charge of the IRGC’s external operations, particularly coordinating with Iraqi Kurdish and Shia groups that were opposed to Saddam’s rule.

The Ramadan Headquarters later became the Quds Force, the external arm of the Guards.

By the time the war ended in 1988, the IRGC had emerged as one of the most powerful institutions of the Islamic Republic. When Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became President (1989-1997), Mr. Zolqadr headed the IRGC Joint Staff. Rafsanjani was followed by Mohammad Khatami, a reformist President. Mr. Zolqadr was among the IRGC commanders who wrote a letter to Mr. Khatami, asking him to take action against student-led protests in the late 1990s. The protests were crushed.

The General’s threat

In the 2005 Presidential election, Mr. Zolqadr aligned with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “We carried out a multilayered plan to help Ahmadinejad win,” Mr. Zolqadr later said. Mr. Ahmadinejad appointed Mr. Zolqadr, who was the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC, as a Deputy Interior Minister. He then warned that if the U.S. were to attack Iran, Tehran would “fire tens of thousands of missiles at American targets every day and threaten Israel as America’s backstop”.

In 2010, Mr. Zolqadr was appointed as a senior aide to Iran’s judiciary chief Sadegh Larijani, the brother of Ali Larijani. Since September 2022, he had been serving as the Secretary of the Expediency Council, an administrative assembly appointed by the Supreme Leader. While its constitutional responsibility is to resolve any differences between the Majles and the 12-member Guardian Council, which has a veto over bills passed by the Assembly, the Expediency Council also acts as an advisory body to the Supreme Leader.

In March 2024, Mr. Zolqadr had said that the Guards should exert greater control over the country. In Iran’s complex power structure, the military establishment, the clerical leadership and elected politicians all wield influence. While the IRGC has long been the backbone of Iran’s armed forces, other branches of the state have also played key roles in running the country.

The war, however, appears to have shifted the balance further towards the Guards, who report directly to the Supreme Leader. Larijani was a politician with links to the IRGC, but Mr. Zolqadr is a Guardsman with political reach. With his ascent to the post of the Secretary of the Security Council, the IRGC has further tightened its grip on Iran’s state machinery.