The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in northern Iran, near the border with Azerbaijan, is still shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories immediately pointed the finger at the fact that, at a time of increased tensions between Iran and Israel, the helicopter on which Raisi was traveling took off from the soil of the Azeri country, which has known military and intelligence relations with Israel.
However, the accident can be explained in a more prosaic way, considering that Raisi was flying in very bad weather conditions on an old Bell 212 helicopter, which probably – also due to sanctions – has not been adequately maintained over the years. In any case, Mohammad Baqeri, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, has appointed General Ali Abdollahi, deputy chief of Staff, to lead a team to investigate the causes of the accident.
There are two main reasons why the deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian are politically important, particularly for the domestic context. The first is that Ebrahim Raisi was, according to numerous sources, Ali Khamene’i’s preferred choice for his succession as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, even more so than his son Mojtaba Khamene’i. The second, closely connected to the first but of broader scope, is that Raisi, among the last five Iranian presidents, was undoubtedly, if not certainly, the most aligned with the external and internal visions of the Supreme Leader, ever since this He last began his mandate in 1989, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.
As former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian pointed out, both reformist former president Mohammad Khatami, pragmatists Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Rouhani, and even populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to varying degrees, had disagreements or even tensions with Khamene’i during their tenure, whether related to internal issues or Iran’s foreign policy…
