Ali Larijani: Iran's ultimate backroom powerbroker

Ali Larijani, Iran's influential politician, played a key role in both security policy and the violent suppression of protests.

Veteran Iranian politician Ali Larijani was one of the most powerful figures in the Islamic Republic, an architect of its security policy, and a close adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei until the supreme leader’s death in an airstrike last month.

Larijani, 67, was killed by a U.S.-Israeli air attack as he was visiting his daughter in the eastern outskirts of a Tehran suburb, Iran’s ​semi-official Fars news agency said on Tuesday (March 17, 2026).

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said earlier on Tuesday that he had been killed in an Israeli strike.

The scion of a leading clerical family with brothers who rose to high positions after the ‌1979 Islamic Revolution, Larijani was seen as canny and pragmatic but always fiercely determined to uphold Iran’s theocratic system of government.

A Revolutionary Guard Corps commander during the Iran-Iraq war ​in the 1980s, he became head of Iran’s national broadcaster before stints running the Supreme National Security Council either side of his membership of parliament, where he was speaker for 12 ⁠years.

His role as the ultimate insider in Ali Khamenei’s Iran gave him responsibilities across a wide portfolio that included critical nuclear negotiations with the West, managing Tehran’s regional ties and the suppression of internal unrest.