An Israeli security official said Israeli strikes against Iran on Friday had ‘likely eliminated’ Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of the Islamic Republic’s armed forces, news agency AFP reported on 13 June.
“It is likely that the Iranian chief of staff and senior nuclear scientists were eliminated in the initial strike,” the official told AFP, who spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Israel carried out strikes against Iran on Friday, targeting its nuclear and military sites, after US President Donald Trump warned of a possible “massive conflict” in the region.
What Netanyahu said?
Earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s operation struck at the ‘heart of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme’, taking aim at the atomic facility in Natanz and nuclear scientists.
Iranian state media said residential buildings in Tehran were also hit, killing a number of civilians, including women and children. Chief of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, was killed in the strikes, Iranian media said.
Iranian state media reports that Bagheri is alive and currently inside a military war room, despite earlier claims suggesting he may have been killed or injured in the initial wave of Israeli strikes.
Who is Mohammad Bagheri?
Major General Bagheri was Iran’s top military official. Bagheri was born Mohammad-Hossein Afshordi in Tehran, but there are conflicting reports about his birth year. Some, including the US Treasury Department, say he was born in 1960 in Tehran, while others list the year as 1958.
Bagheri is a senior Iranian military officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Since 2016, Bagheri has served as the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran – the country’s highest military position.
A military intelligence expert, Bagheri joined the IRGC in 1980 and fought in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980s. Bagheri received an engineering degree and later earned a doctoral degree in political geography from Tarbiyat-e Modares University.
Bagheri was promoted to new chairman of the Armed Forces General Staff (AFGS) from his previous position as deputy chief of staff for intelligence and operations in the General Staff on 28 June, 2016, replacing Hassan Firouzabadi, who held the post for twenty-seven years.
Activities dating back to Islamic Revolution
Bagheri and other commanders, including Mohammad Ali Jafari, Ali Fadavi, and Gholam Ali Rashid, are members of a group identified by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as the IRGC Command Network.
The group “dominates the upper echelons of Iran’s military and controls planning, operations, intelligence, covert and irregular warfare operations, and internal security.”
Bagheri’s activities date back to Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. He was one of the students who attacked and seized the US embassy, according to media reports. Bagheri has also claimed that he played a role in all major operations of the war, with the exception of a few one.
Bagheri’s elder brother, Hassan Bagheri, who was born as Gholam-Hossein Afshordi, was a prominent IRGC commander killed during the Iran-Iraq War.
It is likely that the Iranian chief of staff and senior nuclear scientists were eliminated in the initial strike.
Bagheri participated in senior Iran-Iraq War planning meetings, according to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). These meetings are said to have offered Bagheri exposure to rising military and regime officials, including Qassem Soleimani, who would later become commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Soleimani was assassinated by a targeted drone strike on 3 January 2020 in Baghdad, Iraq.