Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline protégé of the country’s supreme leader who helped oversee the mass executions of thousands in 1988 and later led the country as it enriched uranium near weapons-grade levels and launched a major drone-and-missile attack on Israel, has died. He was 63.
Raisi’s sudden death, along with Iran’s foreign minister and other officials in the helicopter crash Sunday in northwestern Iran, came as Iran struggles with internal dissent and its relations with the wider world.
A cleric first, Raisi once kissed the Quran, the Islamic holy book, before the United Nations and spoke more like a preacher than a statesman when addressing the world.
Raisi, who earlier lost a presidential election to the relatively moderate incumbent Hassan Rouhani in 2017, ended up coming to power four years later in a vote carefully managed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to clear any major opposition candidate.
Raisi’s new administration instead pushed back against international inspections, in part over an ongoing suspected sabotage campaign carried out by Israel targeting its nuclear program. Talks in Vienna at restoring the accord remained stalled in his government’s first months.
“Sanctions are the U.S.’ new way of war with the nations of the world,” Raisi told the United Nations in September 2021.
He added: “The policy of ‘maximum oppression’ is still on. We want nothing more than what is rightfully ours.”
Mass protests swept the country in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been detained over allegedly not wearing a hijab, or headscart, to the liking of authorities.
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