New Delhi: Iran has named Brigadier General Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr the new secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The appointment was announced by state media Tuesday and later confirmed by President Masoud Pezeshkian’s Deputy of Communications Mehdi Tabatabeyi.
Zolghadr succeeds Ali Larijani, who was killed in a US-Israeli military strike last week, and is deemed as much an insider as Larijani was.
His career has been inseparable from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), he was the senior commander, who helped shape the Guard’s operational doctrine. He later co-founded the Ramazan Garrison, a unit whose activities, such as training proxy forces and conducting operations beyond Iran’s borders, led to the development of the Quds Force, IRGC’s foreign arm.
After the Iran-Iraq war ended, Zolghadr served for 16 years at the highest ranks of the IRGC command. He served as the head of its Joint Staff for eight years—the third person in command hierarchy—and later as the deputy commander-in-chief—the second person in the hierarchy—for another eight years.
His appointment as new security chief was approved by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and places one of the senior most leaders of Iran’s Revolution and its wars at the centre of the country’s most strategic body.
In 2021, when he was named the head of the Expediency Council, it was said that he possessed “a revolutionary character” and “valuable executive experiences”.
Earlier Hossein Dehghan, the former defence minister was reported by Iranian media to have been appointed as the security chief after Larijani’s death. However, Zolghadr’s appointment was eventually confirmed Tuesday.
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From IRGC to interior ministry, to judiciary
Born in 1954 in Fasa near Shiraz, Zolghadr came of age in the final years of the Pahlavi monarchy. He studied Economics at the University of Tehran, but like many others of his generation, his education was overtaken by the Iranian Revolution.
Before 1979, he was associated with the Mansourun group, one of the several Islamist militant networks that would later be folded into the architecture of the new regime. The revolution did not so much redirect his path as formalise it.
After the Iran-Iraq war, Zolghadr rose steadily through the ranks of IRGC, making his way to the apex of military decision-making at a time when the Guard was consolidating not just its security role, but also its political influence.
He was once part of the Islamic Revolution Mojahedin Organisation (IRMO), formed after the 1979 Revolution as a coalition of seven Islamist groups that had opposed the Shah. The group had strongly opposed the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), once a prominent leftist-Islamist movement that later went into exile.
Many IRMO members went on to form the core leadership of the IRGC. In 1981, when the MEK launched an armed uprising, IRMO played a key role in suppressing it.
By 1985, the organisation had split into left- and right-wing factions. Zolghadr and Mohsen Rezaei remained aligned with the IRGC, consolidating their influence within Iran’s security establishment. Zolghadr’s ascent was aided by close ties with the likes of Rezaei and Yahya Rahim Safavi, successive commanders of the corps.
Later, like many senior IRGC figures, he moved fluidly between military and civilian institutions as he held senior roles in the Interior Ministry under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, overseeing security and law enforcement, and later took up positions within the judiciary.
In 2007, he was appointed deputy chief of the armed forces’ general staff for Basij-related affairs, the volunteer militia often deployed in moments of domestic unrest.
Iran’s ‘dark horse’
Zolghadr’s name has surfaced, often controversially, in connection with some of the Islamic Republic’s darker chapters.
He is alleged to have headed the “chain murders” of dissidents in the 1990s, as well as the suppression of student protests in 1999. He was also among the group of senior commanders who openly challenged reformist currents during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, as part of the hardline resistance to political liberalisation.
Zolghadr and Rezaei are said to have assassinated an American engineer and an oil company manager in 1978.
Internationally, Zolghadr was on the UN sanctions list for his involvement in the Iranian regime’s nuclear and missile programmes. He was later removed from the list on 18 October, 2023.
His wife Sedigheh Begum Hejazi has also held a senior role in Iran’s cultural bureaucracy, and his son-in-law Kazem Gharibabadi has represented Iran in Vienna at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The family’s reach mirrors the system itself—interlinked, institutional, and largely opaque.
In his latest position, he served as secretary of the Expediency Council, an advisory body tasked with resolving disputes within Iran’s governing system.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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