Mohsen Rezaei, whose four decades in Iran’s ruling establishment span the disputed Karbala-4 offensive, repeated failed presidential campaigns and an Interpol Red Notice over the AMIA bombing, returned to a top security post on Sunday.
The 71-year-old former commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council after Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr resigned little more than four months into the job.
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei separately appointed Rezaei as his representative on the council, consolidating his position in a body central to decisions on war, diplomacy and Iran's confrontation with the United States.
The appointment adds another chapter to a career spanning command of the Revolutionary Guards through most of the Iran-Iraq war, decades in senior political institutions and four attempts to become president.
It also returns to prominence a figure whose record encompasses one of Iran's most disputed wartime operations, an Interpol Red Notice over the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina and years as a recurring subject of satire among Iranians online.
From Islamist militant to Guards commander
Born Mohsen Sabzevar Rezaei Mir-Ghaed in 1954, Rezaei became involved before the 1979 revolution with Mansouroun, an armed Islamist organization opposed to the monarchy.
Following the revolution, Mansouroun and six other Islamist organizations joined to form the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organization.
Rezaei's ascent through the new political order was rapid. Ruhollah Khomeini appointed him commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards in 1981, when Rezaei was 27 and Iran was a year into its war with Iraq.
He remained in command until 1997, overseeing the Guards for almost the entire eight-year war and during its transformation from an armed organization into one of Iran's principal centers of military power.
Rezaei left military command in 1997 and moved into the Expediency Council, becoming its longtime secretary. He later served as vice president for economic affairs under President Ebrahim Raisi.
Politics did not deliver the electoral success he sought.
Rezaei entered presidential contests repeatedly, running in 2005 before withdrawing shortly before voting, and contesting elections in 2009, 2013 and 2021 without winning. His repeated appearances on presidential ballots eventually generated a running joke on Persian-language social media that wherever an election was taking place, Rezaei would inevitably become a candidate.
Karbala-4 and a dispute that followed him for decades
No episode of Rezaei's military career has generated more lasting controversy inside Iran than Operation Karbala-4, launched against Iraqi forces in December 1986.
Rezaei was commander of the Revolutionary Guards when Iranian forces embarked on the operation. Accounts from commanders and participants later indicated that Iraqi forces had obtained advance knowledge of the offensive.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who commanded Iran's war effort at the political level, later recalled learning shortly before the operation that it had been compromised.
Precise casualty figures remain disputed. Rafsanjani's wartime accounts put the toll at around 1,000 killed, 3,900 missing and 11,000 wounded.
The operation acquired renewed public significance decades later, particularly after the remains of 175 Iranian combat divers were returned to Iran in 2015.
Rezaei reopened the controversy in 2018 when he wrote that Karbala-4 had been conducted to deceive Iraq before Iran launched the larger Karbala-5 offensive days later.
The description prompted criticism from veterans, former officials and military figures who argued that Karbala-4 had been designed as a genuine major offensive rather than a diversion.
Rezaei later clarified his remarks, saying Karbala-4 had indeed begun as a main operation but had subsequently been turned into a deception after the decision was made to withdraw.
An audio recording of Rezaei speaking to division commander Hossein Kharrazi during the opening phase also attracted attention because Rezaei could be heard instructing forces to continue advancing.
For critics, the episode became a wider argument over wartime accountability: whether commanders persisted with an operation despite evidence that Iraqi forces were prepared for it, and whether the later characterization of it as deception obscured the original plan.
Wanted in Argentina over AMIA bombing
Rezaei's years commanding the Guards also left him facing an international arrest request.
Argentina has sought him in connection with the July 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured hundreds.
Interpol's Executive Committee approved a Red Notice for Rezaei and five other suspects in 2007 following a request from Argentina. Its General Assembly upheld the decision later that year.
Argentine authorities say Rezaei participated in a meeting at which the attack was decided. Rezaei and Iran have rejected Iranian responsibility.
His international travel has periodically revived the dispute. Argentina sought his arrest when he visited Qatar in 2022, without success.
Hostages for billions
Rezaei's public comments have also periodically generated controversy at home.
In 2015, he suggested that if the United States attacked Iran, Iranian forces could capture at least 1,000 Americans in the first week and demand billions of dollars for each one's release.
The proceeds, he suggested, could solve Iran's economic problems.
Such remarks, combined with his unsuccessful presidential campaigns and frequent television appearances, helped create a second public persona far removed from the image of the young wartime commander.
For some users on Persian-language social media, Rezaei became a stock character for political jokes.
That response resurfaced when Mojtaba Khamenei appointed him military adviser following the 2026 war. Users mocked everything from his return to office to the positioning of his belt buckle, which has itself become a longstanding internet meme.
Appointment revives criticism and ridicule online
Rezaei’s return to a senior security position prompted criticism and satire on X, where Iranian users revisited his wartime record, repeated presidential campaigns and controversial public remarks.
“Is Mohsen Rezaei’s military record, particularly during the war with Iraq, really defensible?” one user wrote. “Where does this extraordinary desire come from? From calling the Karbala-4 failure a deception operation, or from his idea of taking hostages to make money?”
Another user invoked the casualties of Karbala-4 more directly.
“Do you know that a huge number of young people in Operation Karbala-4 never saw the next morning?” the user wrote. “Yes, guess who the commander was. That’s right, Mohsen Rezaei.”
Some users instead interpreted the appointment through Iran’s internal power struggles.
One argued that the Revolutionary Guards had gained influence during the war while technocrats controlled the government, leaving the clergy with diminished power. The user portrayed Rezaei, a veteran Guards commander long removed from operational command, as a possible vehicle for restoring some of that influence.
Another suggested Rezaei’s appointment could strengthen parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, himself a former senior Guards commander.
Other posts sought to connect the reshuffle to reports of friction involving President Masoud Pezeshkian, with one user asking whether Rezaei’s appointment made previous reports about the president considering resignation more credible.
Speculation over Pezeshkian’s position had begun before Rezaei’s appointment.
Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, secretary-general of the Hezbollah of Iran political group, predicted the security council reshuffle in remarks circulated widely on social media, portraying it as part of an effort to constrain President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Kharrazi said that Pezeshkian had resigned or threatened to resign 28 times and that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had grown frustrated with him and warned that another resignation would be accepted.
“That is why they are changing the Supreme National Security Council, moving Mr Zolghadr and replacing him with Mr Mohsen Rezaei,” Kharrazi said.
The prediction gained renewed attention after Zolghadr stepped down and Rezaei was appointed in his place.
Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s office have denied accounts that the president repeatedly offered or threatened to resign.
A survivor returns
Rezaei's latest promotion comes at a markedly different moment from the one in which he first accumulated power.
The Supreme National Security Council has undergone rapid leadership changes following the killing of its former secretary Ali Larijani in March and Zolghadr's brief tenure afterward.
Rezaei now takes charge as Iran confronts the consequences of war and negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz, where he has taken an uncompromising public position.
He said in July that control over the waterway was “more important than dozens of atomic bombs,” and more recently said Iran would not accept an unauthorized shipping route through the Strait.
The appointment nevertheless puts a familiar figure back at the center of the system he helped build: a commander whose career has survived military setbacks, electoral defeats, international accusations and decades of political change, and who now again occupies one of the most consequential seats in Iranian national security policy.
President Masoud Pezeshkian's government has sent the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea to parliament for ratification, ending years in which the treaty sat untouched and reviving a charged argument over the country's historical rights, energy interests and position in the strategically vital basin.
The convention, signed by the leaders of Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in the Kazakh port of Aktau in August 2018, takes effect only once all five littoral states ratify it. The other four completed the process long ago. Tehran, alone, held back.
The charge that shadows the bill is older than the bill itself: a belief, widely held in Iran and rooted in readings of its 1921 and 1940 treaties with Moscow, that the country was entitled to half the Caspian and stands to end up with barely a tenth.
The convention in fact allocates no national shares at all, but the ghost of the fifty percent has trailed every Iranian discussion of the sea since Aktau.
The timing sharpens the argument. The move lands in the middle of a war that has set Iran's southern coast under nightly strikes and closed the Strait of Hormuz, leaving the Caspian corridor to Russia carrying an outsized share of the country's commerce and its strategic weight.
What the treaty actually does is narrower than either its champions or its critics suggest.
It defines the Caspian as a "special and unique landlocked body of water," placing it outside the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Each coastal state receives 15 nautical miles of fully sovereign territorial waters and a further 10 nautical miles of exclusive fishing rights, with the remaining surface designated a shared navigation zone.
The wealth, however, is postponed. Article 8 leaves ownership and delimitation of the seabed and its oil and gas to "bilateral or multilateral agreements between the states concerned."
Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have largely settled their boundaries in the sea's north; the lines involving Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan remain unresolved, tangled in the complexity of dividing energy-rich waters.
A century-old dispute over Iran's share
Before the Soviet collapse, the Caspian was governed by the 1921 and 1940 treaties between Tehran and Moscow, which recognized equal navigation and fishing rights but drew no maritime boundaries.
The Soviet breakup turned two littoral states into five, and Iran has argued since that the sea should be divided equally, 20 percent to each.
Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan instead adopted a modified median-line method, a formula that, because of Iran's concave coastline, would shrink Tehran's share of the sea and its bed to roughly 11 to 13 percent. Iran has never accepted that division.
The government's case: a sealed northern flank
The government presents ratification as completing the Caspian's legal framework, deepening cooperation among the littoral states and, above all, keeping outside powers away.
Officials point to Article 3, which bars the armed forces of non-coastal countries from the Caspian, as the convention's central security prize, a provision long championed by both Tehran and Moscow.
Defa Press, an outlet affiliated with Iran's armed forces, wrote that the clause would "turn Iran's northern borders into a secure region, far removed from scenarios of foreign military intervention," at a moment when the country faces pressure along its southern and western frontiers.
The critics' case: ratifying before the real negotiation
Opponents argue parliament is sequencing the deal backwards: locking in the framework before the seabed, where the money lies, has been divided.
They note that the northern states have already parceled out much of the seabed and pressed ahead with oil and gas development, while fields shared with Iran, including Alborz, remain in limbo.
Dariush Safarnejad, an international affairs analyst, told the Revolutionary Guards-linked Javan newspaper that lawmakers should return the bill to the government, since supplementary agreements that were meant to be completed within six months of the 2018 signing have never been finalized.
Approving the convention without them, he warned, "could provide other Caspian states with legal grounds in the future and influence the security, political and geopolitical dynamics of the Caspian region."
Shoaib Bahman, an international relations analyst focused on Eurasia, told the same paper that ratifying before the seabed boundaries are set would "effectively reduce Iran's legal leverage in future negotiations and could undermine its claim to a 20% share of the Caspian Sea."
Pipelines, corridors and the Turkic map
The critics' second front is Article 14, under which undersea pipelines require the consent only of the states whose sectors they cross, not all five. Bahman argued the clause could open the way for eastern Caspian producers to export oil and gas directly toward Europe, eroding Iran's transit position.
Mehdi Seif-Tabrizi, a Russia specialist, offered a more measured reading to the news website Fararu. Iran's 15 miles of territorial waters and 10 miles of fishing rights are guaranteed, he said, and "the real dispute concerns the seabed and subsoil," not the surface percentages that dominate the public argument.
Yet he shares the strategic worry: that the long-discussed Trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan could finally be built.
"That could strengthen Azerbaijan's position and, in turn, reinforce the Zangezur corridor and the so-called Turkic World project," he said. "If Iran ratifies the convention, it would remove one of the most important legal obstacles to implementing those projects."
The opposition joins the attack
Criticism has come from beyond the establishment's factions. Exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi wrote on X that ratifying the agreement without the Iranian people's mandate and without "a clear and comprehensive guarantee of Iran's historic rights" is "deeply concerning and constitutes a serious threat to Iran's national interests."
Iran's rights in the Caspian, he added, "are not negotiable, nor can they be relinquished. Any action that undermines these rights will be recorded in the historical memory of the Iranian nation, and those responsible will ultimately be held accountable by the people of Iran."
Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior Pahlavi adviser, went further, alleging that Hassan Rouhani's government had already "ceded Iran's share of the Caspian Sea" and that Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf now seek to "legalize and make that concession permanent."
He called the move "the biggest surrender of Iran's land and waters to foreign powers since the Qajar-era humiliations."
Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Saturday that legal proceedings began immediately after Kharrazi's recent remarks and that he had now been summoned to the court, which handles cases involving members of the clergy.
“Immediately after his recent remarks, legal action was initiated to prosecute him,” Jahangir said, adding that Kharrazi's case was under criminal investigation and further details would be released after the proceedings.
‘Islamic Republic doesn't work anymore’
In a video released this week, Kharrazi said the Islamic Republic had “reached a stage where, in this form, it simply doesn't work anymore” and said his organization had already drawn up plans for replacing it with an “Islamic government.”
Kharrazi, who heads the Hezbollah of Iran organization, said his group had produced 60 volumes of plans covering state institutions and had maintained what he described as a “shadow government.”
He also outlined a recruitment drive intended to build a nationwide network of 250,000 supporters, saying it could “surround all the ministries” and converge on Tehran following a single announcement.
“Mr. Khamenei and the government must understand that a 250,000-strong organization stands ready to move,” he said.
Kharrazi also attacked President Masoud Pezeshkian, calling him a “buffoon” who “understands nothing,” and said his government “will not reach its end.”
Claims about Khamenei
Kharrazi is tied by marriage to Iran's ruling family: his sister is married to Masoud Khamenei, a brother of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
He has also presented himself as a longtime confidant of the new supreme leader, saying he has known him for four decades and held numerous private meetings with him. In his latest remarks, Kharrazi said Mojtaba Khamenei's thinking was “far more radical than his father's.” His accounts of private conversations and the supreme leader's views cannot be independently verified.
The leader's office had already publicly rejected earlier remarks Kharrazi attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, including that Pezeshkian's next resignation would be accepted, describing them as unauthenticated and false.
