Meet ‘the butcher,’ Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi
In picking a mass murderer as his potential successor, Iran’s supreme leader hopes to make the United States a willing partner in the repression of his country’s people.
As the Biden administration gives every indication of removing most sanctions on the world’s top state sponsor of terror in pursuit of its nuclear deal, that regime has produced a new president personally culpable—and sanctioned by the United States—for large-scale crimes against humanity. As the handpicked sixty-year-old Ebrahim Raisi is also likely to succeed the ailing Ali Khamenei as the Islamic Republic’s next supreme leader, his deeply disquieting record and mindset warrant close attention.
Raisi became an Islamist ideologue as a teen studying in the seminary in Qom. After the revolution, when he was only 19 years old and lacking any university education, he was appointed as a prosecutor, rising over the following four decades to fill the positions of attorney general, deputy chief justice and, most recently, chief justice of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship.
Most notably, though, Raisi was one of four members of a death committee responsible for the 1988 execution of thousands of Iranian prisoners of conscience in the space of a few months. The ideologically motivated mass executions constituted both a crime against humanity and genocide—a cleansing of religious infidels—according to international human rights expert Geoffrey Robertson. It was a massacre, he says, comparable to those at Srebrenica and the Katyn Forest.
Raisi would typically spend only a few minutes with each prisoner—some young children—asking them questions to test their allegiance to radical Islam. The prisoners, mostly leftist revolutionaries who had helped bring the regime to power, typically refused to feign loyalty, even after prolonged and brutal torture, which in some cases was personally directed and overseen by Raisi. It is estimated that a minimum of a few thousand and as many as 30,000 were killed by hanging or firing squad. The massacre is still shrouded in secrecy, with the regime continuing to deny information to the families of those killed, including about the location of their loved ones’ remains.
What is known is the speed and efficiency of killing, with hangings using forklifts every half hour, and the dumping of dead bodies in piles on trucks, a method and pace that traumatized the executioners themselves. Virgins were systematically raped before their execution, to circumvent the Islamic prohibition on killing virgins and to prevent women and girls from reaching heaven. The executed were ordered to write their own names on their hands before they went to their death. The massacre is a trauma etched into the collective consciousness of all of the Iranian people, throughout the country and throughout the diaspora.
At the time, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who had been designated to succeed the revolutionary leader Khomeini, condemned the mass executions in an act of dissent. In response, Khomeini rescinded Montazeri’s clerical rank, canceled his selection as the next supreme leader, and condemned him to house arrest. In Montazeri’s place, Raisi rose up.
To this day, Raisi is proud of his role as a dutiful mass killer.
