One of the most significant losses for Iran is the death of Brigadier General Mohamad Reza Zahedi, 63, who was killed in the attack on Damascus attributed to Israel where seven other people lost their lives, including his deputy Mohammad Hadi Rahimi. He is in fact the oldest leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Irgs) and the most important, according to some analysts, to lose his life in an attack after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020 by the United States .
Liaison general with Hezbollah
Zahedi, also known by other names (Reza Mahdavi, Hassan Mahdavi or Alireza Zahedi), held the position of senior commander of the IRGS Guards Corps, and was a leading figure in the elite Quds Force, the specialized unit in military intelligence abroad. Leading him were around four thousand Iranian Pasdaran committed to supporting the army of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. Zahedi was also the bridgehead between his country and Hezbollah, allowing the Lebanese movement to receive, among other things, supplies of weapons.
Key figure in Iranian politics
Before arriving in Syria, during the 1980s he had held a crucial role in command of the army during the war that pitted his country against Iraq. The Iran Watch website writes that his name appears on the UN sanctions list as a person linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The European Union also took an interest in this key figure in Iranian politics by placing him on the EU list on 20 April 2007 as a person linked to the IRGC Corps. Zahedi was also sanctioned by the governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, which limited his commercial and financial transactions and froze his assets in those countries.
