One of the founding figures of Iran's IRGC Mohsen Rezaei has been appointed secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council — giving one of the country's most controversial senior figures formal authority over the institution responsible for Tehran's strategic decisions. The appointment was made in a presidential decree signed by Masoud Pezeshkian on Sunday. Hours earlier, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei had separately appointed Rezaei as his personal representative on the council.
With nearly five decades at the top of the Islamic Republic's security and military apparatus, Rezaei, 71, succeeds Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a veteran IRGC commander who resigned after around four months in the post and was appointed as a political adviser to Khamenei. Right after his appointment was announced, Rezaei has said publicly that Iran will not open a second shipping corridor in the Strait of Hormuz, that US warships entering the strait will be targeted, and that the war must end and Iran's frozen assets must be released before Hormuz can be reopened. Rezaei, whose birth name was Sabzvar, was born in 1954 in Khuzestan province into a Bakhtiari tribal family.
Initially a political activist against the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi in the early 1970s, Rezaei was arrested by the shah's intelligence agency SAVAK and imprisoned in Ahvaz. He was one of the founders of the Mansouroun militant group, which helped lay the groundwork for the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organisation. After the 1979 revolution, Rezaei joined the central council of the Islamic Republic and served on a 12-member committee that drafted the IRGC's constitution.
In September 1981, at the age of 27, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini appointed him commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards. Rezaei held the position for 16 years — making him one of the longest-serving military commanders in the history of the Islamic Republic — before stepping down in September 1997. He then became secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council, the body that resolves disputes between parliament and the Guardian Council and sets broad state policy, for nearly 24 years.
He was appointed deputy president for economy under President Ebrahim Raisi in 2021, a post he left in June 2023. Despite this record of institutional prominence, Rezaei has run for president four times and lost each time. In the 2021 election, he received 3.4 million votes — fewer than the number of ballots deemed invalid in the vote.
Rezaei's name has been associated internationally with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured hundreds in the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina's history. In 2007, Argentine prosecutors sought arrest warrants for nine people in connection with the attack, including Rezaei, then IRGC commander. Interpol issued a Red Notice against him that remains in force.
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