Ali Larijani

• 1. Introduction

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  On the night between the 16th and the 17th of March 2026, an Israeli airstrike killed Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. His son Morteza died in the same strike, together with Alireza Bayat, the head of Larijani's office. In the final months of his life, several newspapers had been describing Larijani as the most powerful man in the country. Yet he had never held the one office he openly sought, and that office was closed to him again and again. What kind of path leads a person into the center of a state's security machinery? Why did the system that elevated him also keep turning him away? And what did his death set in motion among the leaders he left behind?

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• 2. Najaf to Tehran

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  Ali Ardashir Larijani was born on the 3rd of June 1958 in Najaf, Iraq, to Iranian parents. The family came from Amol, a city in Mazandaran Province in northern Iran, and was of ethnic Mazanderani background. They belonged to a religious Shia gentry. His father, Hashim Larijani, was a leading Twelver Shia cleric. The family had gone to Najaf in 1931 because of pressure from the ruler Reza Shah, and it came back to Iran in 1961. During the later years of that reign, Hashim and other relatives were also exiled to Bukan and Sardasht, two Kurdish-inhabited cities in the northwest. They stayed there for a time before being allowed to return to the north.

  His siblings built careers of their own. Sadiq Larijani became President of the Judicature, and Bagher Larijani joined the faculty of Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Fazel Larijani served as Iran's cultural attache in Ottawa, and Mohammad-Javad Larijani was a further brother. The politician Ahmad Tavakkoli was a cousin, because his mother and Larijani's mother were sisters. Larijani also married into a famous clerical household. His father-in-law was Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari.

  Motahhari's advice shaped his education. Larijani held a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and mathematics from Aryamehr University of Technology, and he graduated from the Qom Seminary. He first planned to continue in computer science. After consulting Motahhari, he changed course and earned a master's degree and a doctorate in Western philosophy at the University of Tehran.

  His books show where that change led. Three of them appeared in 2004, all on Immanuel Kant: The Mathematical Method in Kant's Philosophy, Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences in Kant's Philosophy, and Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Kant's Philosophy. He also published books on Saul Kripke and David Lewis. A 2005 collection of essays and reflections was called Fresh Air. In 2024 came Reason and Tranquility in Governance, a work of political philosophy. Larijani was a faculty member of the School of Literature and Humanities at the University of Tehran, a post that ran alongside a very different career.

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• 3. Guard and Broadcaster

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  In 1981 Larijani joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force through which he rose inside the Islamic Republic. He became a commander in the Guard and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. Civilian posts followed. He served as deputy minister of labor and social affairs, and later as deputy minister of information and communications technology.

  In March 1994 he was appointed head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, known as IRIB. He replaced Mohammad Hashemi Rafsanjani in that job. He held it until the 21st of July 2004, a full decade, when Ezzatollah Zarghami succeeded him.

  Critics judged those ten years harshly. They accused Larijani of turning state media into a tool for what they called the mass assassination of the character of intellectuals and dissidents. During this period IRIB aired forced confessions from political activists. Human rights organizations saw that practice as a hallmark of the government's efforts to discredit domestic opposition.

  In August 2004 Larijani moved from the broadcaster to the inner circle, as security adviser to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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• 4. Nuclear Envoy

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  In the 2005 presidential election Larijani collected 1,713,810 votes, just under 6 percent, and finished sixth. He had been the conservative camp's most important hope. The Council for Coordination of the Forces of the Revolution, made up of representatives of several influential conservative parties and organizations, made him its final choice. The Islamic Society of Engineers was among his backers. Even so, he proved the least popular of the three conservative candidates. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad placed second in the first round and won the runoff. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf placed fourth in the first round.

  The winner then gave Larijani a job. On the 15th of August 2005 Ahmadinejad appointed him secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, replacing Hassan Rouhani. The council helps draw up nuclear and other policies issued by the supreme leader. As chief nuclear negotiator, Larijani reportedly differed with the president, according to Iranian analysts. They said he favored a more pragmatic approach in talks with European counterparts.

  On the 25th of April 2007 he told reporters he expected "new ideas" from the senior European Union official Javier Solana. The talks were stuck on a deadlock. Tehran refused to freeze its nuclear programme, while the United Nations Security Council demanded that it do so.

  Larijani tried to leave the post more than once. Ahmadinejad turned down his earlier resignations, and on the 20th of October 2007 he finally accepted one. The next test for Larijani would come in March 2008, at the ballot box in Qom.

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• 5. Speaker and Outsider

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  In the March 2008 parliamentary election, voters in Qom gave Larijani a seat, with 239,436 votes and 73.01 percent. He said he was willing to work with Ahmadinejad. By his account the two did not clash over ideology and had only "differences in style". In May 2008 he became speaker of parliament, and he was reelected to the chairmanship the following year.

  In the 2012 elections he again topped the poll in Qom, with 270,382 votes and 65.17 percent. He was elected chairman once more on the 5th of June 2012 and sworn in on the 11th of June. He won another term as speaker in May 2016. He held the speakership until 2020.

  The presidential election of June 2009 produced a puzzle. On the 21st of June 2009, Larijani implied that authorities had taken the side of one candidate, without saying which. He was also reported to have congratulated Mir Hossein Mousavi, believing from "firsthand and classified information and news" that Mousavi had won. On the 22nd of October 2012, in a question-and-answer session with students at Iran University of Science and Technology, he denied that he had congratulated Mousavi.

  In March 2016 a poll by Information and Public Opinion Solutions LLC found 45 percent of Iranians approved of him and 34 percent disapproved. That gave him a net rating of plus 11. Another 11 percent did not recognize his name.

  In May 2021 he declared his bid for the presidency. The vetting Guardian Council disqualified him, in a decision that astounded both conservatives and reformists. He had been among the top echelons of power since the 1979 revolution, and even his staunch detractors had not imagined such a rejection. In May 2024 he applied again, and the Guardian Council turned him down again.

  The rejections did not remove him from public life. He sat on the Expediency Discernment Council from 1997 to 2008 and returned to it in 2020.

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• 6. Ideas and Alliances

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  A 2002 book by the Iranian scholar Mehdi Moslem, Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran, suggested that Larijani had been a member of the Motalefeh and part of the traditional right. He was thought to hold Motalefeh views during his time in the cabinet of Hashemi Rafsanjani, from 1992 to 1994. Payam Mohseni, a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, placed him as a lead figure in the theocratic right. Mohseni named Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi and Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani as other prominent members of that camp.

  In the 2008 parliamentary elections Larijani was one of the leaders of the Principlists Pervasive Coalition, and he was also a leader of the United Front of Principlists. In 2016 he led the Followers of Wilayat faction. The reformist List of Hope backed him that year, although he said he was running as an independent.

  Labels for him varied. Observers called him center-right, a moderate conservative, a conservative-turned-moderate, and a politician who slowly distanced himself from the Principlist camp. Some described a hardline approach to relations with the West paired with pragmatism on internal affairs. He admired the model of Deng Xiaoping in the People's Republic of China. He criticized heavy state involvement in the economy and favored a gradual economic and cultural opening alongside diplomatic engagement. According to Ali Alfoneh, he was also an Iranian nationalist. He often spoke about sanctions and the economic pressure from the West. He regarded velayat-e faqih, the doctrine of clerical guardianship, as a form of democracy.

  His loyalties among rivals were clear. He opposed Mohammad Khatami and supported Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He was against Ahmadinejad, yet he supported some reforms of Hassan Rouhani. His close associates included the interior minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, Behrouz Nemati, spokesman for the parliament's presiding board, and Kazem Jalali, head of the parliament's research center.

  His father-in-law Morteza Motahhari strongly influenced him. It is not known whether Larijani embraced Motahhari's Islamic socialism, which was described as "neither right nor left". One day before his death, he rebuked Islamic countries, the United Arab Emirates in particular, for "abandoning Iran" and siding with the United States and Israel.

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• 7. Final Year of Power

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  In March 2025 U.S. president Donald Trump sent a letter to Iran seeking to reopen nuclear negotiations. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remarked that "Some bullying governments insist on negotiations not to resolve issues but to impose their own expectations," which was seen as a reply. Later that month Larijani said Iran would have no choice but to develop nuclear weapons if attacked by the United States, Israel or its allies.

  On the 13th of June 2025 the Iran-Israel war broke out, with attacks on several nuclear facilities. On the 22nd of June the United States Air Force and Navy struck the Natanz Nuclear Facility, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Research Center. On the 5th of August 2025 President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed Larijani secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for a second time.

  In that post he was the top negotiator on national security, including the nuclear program. He was one of two representatives of Khamenei to the council, the other being Hassan Rouhani. He also sat on the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. A University of Maryland School of Public Policy report from December 2025, Iranian Public Opinion Soon After the Twelve-Day War, found 43 percent viewed him favorably, 8 percent of them very favorably. That was up from 32 percent in March 2024.

  From about the 28th of December 2025, the newspaper Haaretz and others called him the country's most powerful man. The Australian and other outlets called him the "de facto leader". The Revolutionary Guard reportedly supported him. Accounts describe how he used close ties to Guard commanders and intelligence services, together with his family's longstanding connections to senior clerics. With these he built support across rival factions and prepared to assume leadership after Khamenei's death.

  The New York Times reported that he ran Iran from January 2026 and was in charge of crushing, with lethal force, protests demanding an end to Islamic rule. Human rights organizations said he was among the first senior officials to publicly call for lethal force, labeling demonstrators "armed terrorist networks". They reported that the council, under his coordination, authorized military-grade weapons and live ammunition. The response was reportedly modeled on the "Tiananmen Square" method of overwhelming force. Human rights monitors estimated that between 7,000 and 36,500 Iranians were killed in the "January uprising", many on the 8th and the 9th of January 2026. In January 2026 the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned him, citing his role in "coordinating the suppression of protests and issuing orders for the use of force against peaceful protesters."

  His public statements hardened as the confrontation widened. After the assassination of Ali Khamenei, Larijani said Iran's government would not "leave Trump alone". When the European Union moved to label the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, he tweeted a warning. He said the military forces of any country backing that decision would be considered terrorist groups and would face consequences.

  The pressure reached his family in the United States. His daughter, Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, had studied at the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. During the 2026 massacres, Iranian American activists protested her job at Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, Georgia. Republican congressman Buddy Carter demanded that she be fired and her medical license revoked, calling her a threat to national security. She was fired two days later. After the 2026 Iran war began, the Trump administration terminated her green card and her husband's, and deported them.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  Two accounts of Larijani's last hours disagree. Fars News Agency reported that a U.S.-Israeli strike killed him as he visited his daughter in the outskirts of eastern Tehran. Israeli intelligence officials said they tracked his movements after a tip from residents of Tehran. In their version, he was bombed while meeting other officials at a hideout on the city's outskirts. On the same night a separate Israeli airstrike killed Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij, Iran's internal militia.

  The New York Times reported that the killing raised anxiety among regime officials. One official described shaking when the call about Larijani's death came. He said there was "a pervasive sense of anxiety, that Israel would not stop until all of Iran's leaders were killed and the Islamic Republic toppled." Others worried about their own safety and wondered who would be targeted next.

  Public reactions followed once Iran confirmed his death. The new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, released a statement expressing regret and vowing vengeance. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the death would not topple "Tehran's strong political structure." Hatef Salehi, a conservative analyst with ties to the government, posted that Larijani's absence "would decrease the chances of finding a low-cost political solution to end the war."

  Larijani was buried at the Fatima Masumeh Shrine in Qom, his hometown by the account of the record. On the 24th of March 2026, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr succeeded him as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

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