U.S.-Israeli strike kills Iran Guards intelligence chief

U.S.-Israeli strikes on Monday (April 6, 2026) killed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards intelligence chief, who earlier this year had been sanctioned by the United States for his role in suppressing anti-government protests.

Major General Majid Khademi, who, according to a statement by the Guards was killed in an airstrike at dawn, was one of several senior figures within the force to be killed so far in the war.

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Khademi spent much of his career in the intelligence apparatus of the Revolutionary Guards’, the ideological army of the Islamic republic whose mandate is to protect it from internal and external threats.

He was promoted to be chief of the Guards’ intelligence when his predecessor Mohammad Kazemi was killed last year in an airstrike in Israel’s 12-day war against Iran.

This meant Khademi was in his role during nationwide protests in January which according to rights groups were suppressed by forces including the Revolutionary Guards in a crackdown that left thousands dead.

That month the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Khademi, saying that under his leadership the Guards’ intelligence arm “has played an instrumental role in violently suppressing protests”.

The Guards’ intelligence branch, it added, “has underpinned the Iranian security forces’ national campaign of mass violence, arbitrary detentions, and intimidation aimed at crushing Iran’s protest moment”.

Announcing Khademi’s death, the Guards paid tribute to what the force said was his “great, lasting and instructive contributions in the fields of intelligence and security” in the Islamic republic.

It said this had paved the way to help Iran in the years to come confront “foreign enemies and their sinister and evil plans to infiltrate and destabilise Iran’s security and peace.”

Since the start of the war, U.S.-Israeli airstrikes have killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and a whole echelon of the political and military elite in the Islamic republic in targeted killings.

The Guards had already been hit before the killing of Khademi. Their commander in chief, Mohammad Pakpour, was killed on the first day of the war on February 28 but then replaced by former interior minister Ahmad Vahidi.

The chief spokesman of the Guards, the head of its naval branch and the head of its Basij militia division have also been killed.

But several key figures have survived and the Islamic republic has shown resilience in rapidly replacing killed leaders and also keeping up the war against the U.S. and Israel.