Ali Larijani was an Iranian veteran power-broker and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. He was assassinated by Israel on March 17th 2026, during the third Gulf war. Binyamin Netanyahu announced the killing, saying Israel was "undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it."
A professor of philosophy—his academic speciality was Immanuel Kant—and a qualified mathematician, he was steeped in clerical lineage: his father was an ayatollah; his father-in-law was the Islamic revolution's leading theoretician and right-hand of Ruhollah Khomeini; his brother Sadeq Larijani ran the judiciary for a decade. Larijani himself occasionally led Friday prayers in Ali Khamenei's stead, served in the IRGC, held four ministerial posts and spent 12 years as speaker of parliament. He trained in a seminary and fought with the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq war. He was unusual in straddling the three main pillars of the regime: the IRGC, the Islamic clergy and the bureaucracy.
Larijani has emerged as the supreme leader's chief operative, described as having "replaced Qassem Suleimani" as Khamenei's eminence grise. The constitution allows the supreme leader to delegate his powers, and in recent years Larijani, rather than president Masoud Pezeshkian, has represented Khamenei in dealings with Russia, China and the Gulf monarchies. Before a round of negotiations with America, he travelled to Oman to set the regime's terms. After the failure of Hizbullah and other Shia proxies to deter Israel, Khamenei turned to Larijani—a civilian, not the head of the Quds Force—to manage relations with Lebanon and Yemen, widely read as a rebuke to the generals. Larijani played a key role in the January 2026 massacres, leading the Trump administration to put him under sanctions by name.
He thrice sought the presidency, though hardliners barred him on two of those occasions. He cast himself as a loyal but pragmatic conservative. As culture minister and later head of state broadcasting, he hounded reformists and aired forced confessions. Yet he also aligned himself with Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the pragmatic former president who led post-war reconstruction in the 1990s and pursued détente with the West. He criticised vote-rigging that ensured Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's return as president in 2009, and consistently favoured a nuclear agreement—as speaker, he hustled through approval of the 2015 nuclear deal. As a philosophy professor he taught the Enlightenment, specialising in the work of Immanuel Kant.
Some thought Larijani's sights were set on supreme power. The Islamic Republic had shed much of its clerical garb, and a successor in a business suit was no longer unthinkable. Rivals circled: Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the speaker, commanded deeper loyalties within the IRGC.
Some saw Larijani as the potential leader of a more pragmatic "second Islamic Republic", or even Iran's counterpart to Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's vice-president, whom Donald Trump elevated to head of state. Hardliners, who had previously vetoed his presidential candidacy, were thought to want to appoint Saeed Jalili, a more ideological figure, to replace him at the head of the National Security Council—a move that would signal an Iran less likely to agree to a deal and more likely to pursue nuclear weapons. A veteran opposition figure said after his killing: "They've removed the one person most likely to reach an accommodation."
On March 24th the National Security Council replaced Larijani with Muhammad Zulghadr, an IRGC apparatchik. Larijani had been a former philosophy professor; Zulghadr's appointment underscored the military's consolidation of power.
Instead of the starched white shirts favoured by most senior Iranian officials, he wears loose black ones that owe something to Johnny Cash. He has many relatives in the West: a nephew is an academic in Britain; a daughter taught in America until Iranian critics in exile forced her out of her university post because of her father's position. He claims that during the summer 2025 war an Israeli phoned to give him 12 hours to leave Iran to avoid assassination, and that he hung up.
Wonderful day. Your hangover just makes it seem terrible.