Who is Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei, hard-line IRGC veteran appointed to top security post?

Former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Mohsen Rezaei has been appointed secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, replacing Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who held the post for less than a year.

Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei announced Rezaei's appointment and the end of Zolghadr's tenure on Sunday. Zolghadr, an IRGC hard-liner himself, was appointed in March following the death of Ali Larijani. 

"I am hopeful that you will achieve great success in carrying out this important responsibility," Khamenei wrote to Rezaei in a post on X. 

In a separate post, Khamenei appointed Zolghadr as a political adviser. 

The Supreme National Security Council is Iran's highest decision-making body on national security, defense and foreign policy. Chaired by the president and operating under the authority of the supreme leader, the council coordinates military, intelligence and diplomatic policy across the Iranian state.

Its 12 permanent members include the heads of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, senior ministers, top military commanders and representatives appointed by Khamenei. The secretary oversees the council's day-to-day work and plays a central role in implementing its decisions, including on Iran's nuclear file.

Who is Rezaei? 

Rezaei, 71, is one of the Islamic Republic's longest-serving military and political figures. 

According to IranWire, he was born in the southwestern city of Masjed Soleyman in Iran's Khuzestan province to a Bakhtiari Lur family, part of one of Iran's largest ethnic tribal communities. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the city before becoming involved in the movement that preceded Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.

He was reportedly arrested by SAVAK, the shah's secret police and intelligence agency, in 1973 at age 17 and spent more than five months in prison in the city of Ahvaz.

Following his release, Rezaei enrolled at Iran's University of Science and Technology in Tehran to study mechanical engineering, according to Iran's Press TV. He later left the program as he became increasingly involved in opposition groups.

Following the 1979 revolution, Rezaei joined the newly established IRGC, the elite paramilitary force created to safeguard the Islamic Republic. Rezaei reportedly helped draft the IRGC's charter in 1979.

In 1980, he became the first head of the IRGC's political intelligence unit. One year later, Iran's first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, appointed Rezaei to commander-in-chief of the IRGC at just 27 years old. He led the organization throughout most of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and oversaw its emergence as one of Iran's most powerful military institutions.

According to journalist Kim Ghattas, the author of "Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East," Rezaei was instrumental in establishing Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s. Ghattas wrote on X Monday that he led Iran’s first expeditionary mission to Damascus in June 1982 with hundreds of fighters and from there traveled with around 200 men to the Bekaa Valley, where they helped establish the group.

Rezaei remained at the helm of the IRGC for 16 years before leaving the post in 1997, when he was replaced by Yahya Rahim Safavi under Iran’s Reformist President Mohammad Khatami. Rezaei had backed Khatami’s conservative rival in the presidential election. 

Rezaei earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Tehran in 2001.

After leaving the IRGC, Rezaei turned to Iran’s political establishment, serving as secretary of the Expediency Council from 1997 to 2021. The 34-member council was established to resolve legislative disputes between parliament and the Guardian Council. It also advises the supreme leader on matters of state policy.

He later served as vice president for economic affairs under the late conservative President Ebrahim Raisi from 2021 to 2023 and currently sits on both the Expediency Discernment Council and the Supreme Council for Economic Coordination.

Rezaei has mounted multiple unsuccessful bids for Iran's presidency, running as a conservative candidate in 2009, 2013 and 2021. In 2021, he finished second to Raisi.

Iran’s Mehr News Agency reported in March that Rezaei had been appointed military adviser to Khamenei. 

International scrutiny

Rezaei has been wanted by Argentine authorities since 2006 in connection with the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people, and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center, which killed 85 people — the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina's history. Interpol has maintained a Red Notice for Rezaei since 2007 in connection with the AMIA investigation.

In March, Argentina designated the IRGC a terrorist organization, linking the move to the IRGC’s support for Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, which Argentine authorities accuse of carrying out the bombings.

A statement announcing the designation said that Argentine judicial and intelligence investigations found that both the 1992 and 1994 bombings were “planned, financed and executed with the direct participation of senior officials of the Iranian regime and operatives of the Revolutionary Guard.”

In 1998, Rezaei's son, Ahmad, fled to the United States and reportedly told US officials that the attack on the Israeli Embassy had been planned in Tehran and that he had accompanied his father to Lebanon, where he witnessed militant training. Ahmad later returned to Iran and retracted those claims. He was found dead in a Dubai hotel room in 2011 in what authorities described as an apparent suicide.

In January 2020, the US sanctioned Rezaei under an executive order by President Donald Trump. A statement released by the US Treasury Department at the time described Rezaei as having “advanced the regime’s destabilizing objectives.”