When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 37 years, was killed by Israel on February 28 in the opening airstrike of the war against the Islamic Republic, he was succeeded by his son Mojtaba.
But at 86, the ayatollah had wielded a level of influence that no replacement could soon match.
Senior Iranian officials maintain that all key matters are run by the 56-year-old heir. Decision-making, however, extends beyond one man, experts say, guided by a small, elite band of mostly current or former senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guard.
It is not the Guard as an organisation that is exerting control, they say, but a hardened “band of brothers” whose seminal experience was the brutal, eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that began in 1980.
Founded in 1979 to safeguard the newborn revolution and its leader, the Guard promoted these commanders to generals while they were still in their late 20s or early 30s. Western support for Iraq in the war convinced them that Iran had to forge its own way, no matter the cost.
After the war, they went on to control intelligence or security services. Most are believed to have some personal connection with Mojtaba Khamenei from the long years that he directed his father’s office.
These men are among the hardest-line figures in the country – militants not only in terms of perpetuating the Islamic Revolution, but also in the harsh methods they have championed while running the main organs of government repression.
Their shared backgrounds, careers and ideological outlook are one reason the war has neither collapsed the government nor paralysed it, despite the deaths of about 50 top political and military leaders, experts say.
Whatever jockeying may be taking place among these central figures over whether to seek a pragmatic end to the conflict remains largely opaque. Some shunned the limelight even before the war. Now they remain hidden for fear of being targeted.
Here are some of the most powerful figures in Iran today.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, 64
The speaker of the Iranian parliament since 2020, Ghalibaf has served as commander of the Guard air force and chief of the national police, as well as the mayor of Tehran.
Ghalibaf once boasted that during anti-government demonstrations in 1999, despite his rank, he had ridden on the back of a motorcycle like an ordinary militiaman to beat protesters with sticks.
In 2004, he ran for president and tried to change his image. “He showed up on election day looking like Don Johnson on Miami Vice,” donning a white suit and sunglasses instead of his uniform, said Afshon Ostovar, author of Vanguard of the Imam, a history of the Guard. It was a failed attempt to appeal to middle-class voters, and made some conservative supporters suspect his ambitions.
Ghalibaf is something of a bridge between the political and military elite. Considered a pragmatic figure, he negotiated directly with the United States in Pakistan last month. Some detractors suspect that he seeks a peace deal that will make him an Iranian strongman.
Ahmad Vahidi, 67
Vahidi is a former intelligence officer who took over the Guard in March after US and Israeli airstrikes killed his predecessor. A veteran, bellicose general, he previously served as both minister of defence and interior minister.
Vahidi became prominent in 1988 as the first commander of the Quds Force, which built proxy regional militias such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
He is suspected of embedding terrorism in their DNA. Attacks under his watch included the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994 that left 85 people dead, and a truck bomb targeting a US Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, killing 19 servicemen. Iran has repeatedly denied involvement in both attacks.
Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, 69
The head of Iran’s judiciary since 2021, Mohseni-Ejei has a reputation as a hanging judge who has long used the courts to throttle dissent, including a torrent of recent executions of participants in anti-government protests early this year.
Mohseni-Ejei was the minister of intelligence during protests after the 2009 presidential election.
The public perception of a fraudulent vote fuelled the Green Movement, a nationwide wave of demonstrations that his ministry helped to squash through imprisonment, torture and executions. He was a target of sanctions by both the United States and the European Union.
Hossein Taeb, 63
Taeb is a Shia Muslim cleric who ran the brutal Basij militia and then government counterintelligence operations before heading the Guard’s own intelligence organisation from 2009 to 2022.
Notorious for crushing dissent, the organisation during his tenure also imprisoned for ransom or other exchanges numerous Iranian American and other dual nationals, detailed in reports by both Etemad, an Iranian daily newspaper, and Human Rights Watch.
Government violence during the 2009 protests prompted public criticism, with one member of parliament writing in comments published online: “When we place management of the recent crisis in the hands of individuals like Taeb, who are more familiar with the baton than with thought, reason and prudence, the result will be exactly this.”
Taeb remains a central figure, although in 2022 he lost his top intelligence post in the fallout over Israel wreaking havoc on the country’s nuclear program.
He is believed to be close to Mojtaba Khamenei, having served in the same prestigious Habib Battalion of the Guard during the Iran-Iraq war.
Mohammad Ali Jafari, 68
Jafari, a two-star general, was a military adviser to the former supreme leader. Now lacking an official role, he commanded the Guard from 2007 to 2019, one of the longest tenures.
Earlier, he had participated in a blatantly public foray by two dozen Guard commanders into political life, threatening then president Mohammad Khatami with a letter in 1999 demanding that student protests be suppressed.
A bright tactician, Jafari, known as Aziz, is credited with developing the “mosaic strategy” of decentralised command that enabled the force to continue fighting in the current war even as many key commanders were killed.
Jafari also played a central role in creating the regional proxy forces confronting Israel. “The Revolutionary Guards will fight to the end of the Zionist regime,” he was quoted as saying in 2015. “We will not rest easy until this epitome of vice is totally deleted from the region’s geopolitics.”
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, 72
Zolghadr is a prime example of what analysts consider the fusion of the military into the political class.
A deputy commander of the Guard and a former deputy interior minister with a hard-line reputation, he was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in March, replacing Ali Larijani, a prominent conservative figure who was killed.
The council, uniting senior military and civilian officials, formulates security and foreign policy. Zolghadr’s new position involves ensuring that the government’s political, military, security and judicial arms all operate in tandem.
‘A brotherhood running the country’
Over the course of almost 40 years, this intelligence fraternity first dominated the Guard, and has now become “a brotherhood running the country”, said Saeid Golkar, a Guard expert who is a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“They had information and intelligence, they had a lot of information about how the system works, about the opposition, about reformists, even about hardliners,” he said.
“They survey, they control, they spy on each other. Because of that dominance over intelligence, they gradually became dominant in almost any aspect of politics in Iran.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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