Winston Churchill once described Russia as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery within an enigma.” The same could be said of Iran today and now, with the death of its president, killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday, Tehran’s goals and ambitions have become even more impenetrable.
Foreign leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and other anti-Western despots, have expressed grief over the death of Ebrahim Raisi. So have democratically elected leaders like India’s Narendra Modi and even one or two senior officials in the European Union.
In Iran, however, the five days of official mourning have been interrupted by celebratory fireworks and the sound of car horns. To many Iranians, especially young people, Raisi was a bloodthirsty oppressor known as the “Butcher of Tehran.”
In his journey from his youth as a participant in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 – which overthrew the corrupt and repressive regime of the Shah – to his final destiny as president of the republic itself, Raisi, 63, had followed a tragically common path. : from idealistic teenage revolutionary to hanging judge before the age of 30.
Just as the French Revolution of 1789 quickly gave way to the tyranny of Robespierre and the Russian Revolution spawned the twin despots Lenin and Stalin, the unity of those who overthrew the Shah soon fragmented and gave way to infighting, purges and a new form even more cruel of autocracy.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died Sunday in a helicopter crash. To many Iranians, especially young people, Raisi was a bloodthirsty oppressor known as the “Butcher of Tehran.”
Rescuers at the site of a helicopter crash in a foggy, mountainous region of Iran
And Raisi distinguished himself as a remarkably cruel enforcer of Iran’s new dogmatic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Those who had once opposed the Shah’s regime because they were democrats or socialists – rather than Islamists – were declared “enemies of God” and terribly persecuted.
As a judge, Raisi specialized in handing down death sentences after five-minute trials. In one particularly brutal purge, he sentenced some 5,000 people in just a few weeks, often supervising the executions himself.
Victims were hanged in public and their own children were sometimes forced to watch.
Professional success did not moderate his prospects. Raisi’s elevation to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2021 was a sign that his patron, the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei (Khomeini’s successor), wanted to crack down on dissent in the country and assert the Iran’s influence abroad.
Strict enforcement of dress standards for women was a sign that the ruling fanatics would not bend or moderate their views, whatever the internal pressure from a disaffected population.
And when it came to foreign affairs, it was Raisi who increased Iran’s support for radical Islamist groups such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, in an attempt to disrupt a united, US-led West.
Raisi also courted Putin’s Russia, providing it with his cheap – but devastatingly effective – Shahed drones to attack Ukraine.
The mountainous region where the helicopter crashed. Raisi, Iran’s Foreign Minister and several other officials found dead
The ill-fated helicopter carrying the Iranian president was photographed taking off.
China also became an ally and agreed to buy much of Iran’s oil as a way to avoid Western sanctions led by the United States.
Needless to say, that antagonism between the West and Israel has been fueling conspiracy theories about how it met its end.
In reality, the crash was almost certainly caused by pilot error in dangerously foggy conditions in the mountains of northwestern Iran.
But suspicion abounds that Israeli agents somehow sabotaged Raisi’s helicopter, just as they sabotaged Iran’s nuclear facilities and murdered several of its atomic scientists.
Such speculation suits Tehran and helps divert attention from a growing wave of political problems on the home front.
But Raisi’s sudden death poses a double succession problem for the Islamic Republic.
Iran must not only find a new president, but also address the increasingly urgent question of who will succeed the real power in the country: the ailing Supreme Leader, 85-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei.
Rescue teams scour the mountains to find the crashed helicopter and its occupants.
While the Iranian president is the day-to-day head of government, it is the Supreme Leader who has ultimate authority over the country’s stance on all important issues.
Raisi may well have imagined himself in the role, but now that he is out of the picture we can expect heated, possibly bloody, infighting among Iran’s revolutionary elite.
Voters will have little or no choice, of course, but then democracy like Iran’s has fallen into disrepute and election turnout has fallen to embarrassingly low levels.
As support for the regime wanes, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, in concert with the ‘Basij’ (thugs who work as a kind of local riot police) have become increasingly visible, instilling fear and stifling dissent.
The Revolutionary Guards are the most powerful enforcers of the regime. Like the Praetorian Guards of the Roman emperors 2,000 years ago, they protect the state and its leaders against threats both internal and external and are the ones who will most likely decide who will end up president and supreme leader.
If these elite soldiers openly decide who leads the Islamic Republic, then any pretense of Iran being a democracy will disappear. It will become a dictatorship whose political power comes from the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong once said.
And in that, there are enormous dangers for the regime itself, as history tells us. The sources of discontent that disfigured and then destroyed the Shah’s regime in the year before 1979 have reappeared in Iran.
So Iranians of all ages and both sexes were disgusted with the corruption of the Shah’s cronies and the squandering of the country’s natural oil wealth on prestige projects and huge military expenditures.
Nowadays, the daughters of the Islamic elite have been seen partying in New York wearing clothes far more revealing than anything the girls wear at home. Photographs of them are circulating in Tehran at a time when ordinary Iranians are finding life increasingly difficult under Western sanctions.
People also wonder why Iran sends billions to terrorist groups abroad while its own citizens become increasingly impoverished.
But those rejoicing at the disappearance of the Butcher of Tehran should be careful what they wish for. The largest and oldest country in the Middle East lies at the heart of the most sensitive geopolitical region in the world.
Will Iran’s beleaguered mullahs respond to the crisis by redoubling their efforts, accelerating the race to acquire nuclear weapons, for example, or launching more armed conflicts in the region?
Yes, let us wait for the end of the Islamic Republic that Ebrahim Raisi served so cruelly for so long. But we must pray that it ends not with a bang but with a whimper.