The man chosen to replace Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security adviser who was killed in an Israeli strike last week, is a hard-line former deputy commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards who is little-known to most Iranians but has a long history of helping the organization expand its reach into Iran’s politics.
The appointment of the former commander, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, was announced on Tuesday by a senior aide to Iran’s president.
Mr. Zolghadr’s appointment provided more evidence that hard-line military figures had consolidated their power in Iran, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an expert on Iran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that promotes a close U.S. partnership with Israel and confrontation with Iran.
Though the increase in the Guards’ power has been decades in the making, Mr. Taleblu said in a post on X, “there can also be no doubt that the war expedited and accelerated the ongoing trend of increasing I.R.G.C. control of the country.”
The Revolutionary Guards are the military spine of the Islamic republic and are ideologically committed to maintaining Iran’s system of clerical rule. The Guards control the development and deployment of ballistic missiles and drones, protect the country’s nuclear development facilities, supervise proxy militias across the Middle East and control a sizable portion of the economy.
After Mr. Larijani’s killing last week, some analysts expressed worry that Iran’s military would tighten its control over the country, dimming the prospects for a quick end to the war.
Mr. Larijani oversaw a brutal crackdown that killed thousands of antigovernment protesters in January, but he was still seen as a relative pragmatist who served as a bridge between the military and more moderate political factions.
Mr. Zolghadr helped the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, come to power in 2005, and he later acknowledged that Iran’s hard-line conservative forces had carried out a “multilayered plan” to help Mr. Ahmadinejad win. Mr. Zolghadr went on to serve as a deputy interior minister during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s first term.
When tensions building between Iran and the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Zolghadr, as a deputy interior minister, said that if the United States were to attack Iran, Iran would fire “tens of thousands of missiles at American targets every day” in response.
In 2010, Mr. Zolghadr became a senior aide to Iran’s judiciary chief at the time, Sadegh Larijani, the brother of Ali Larijani. Since 2021, Mr. Zolghadr has led Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council, a body that advises Iran’s supreme leader.
Before Iran’s 1979 revolution, which deposed the Shah and established the Islamic state, Mr. Zolghadr was active in an armed group that carried out attacks against the monarchy. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, he led a unit that carried out cross-border operations.
Yeganeh Torbati is the Iran correspondent for The Times.
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