Hamidreza Azizi:
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After the 12-Day War of June 2025 inflicted significant losses on the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made changes to the IRGC leadership and appointed Mohammad Pakpour as its commander in chief, with Vahidi as the deputy commander, a position he held until Pakpour’s killing in an Israeli airstrike on Feb. 28. Now at the helm, Vahidi represents another facet of the new power structure in Iran. Unlike Ghalibaf, he has never sought to soften or obscure his identity as a man of the security establishment.
But Vahidi’s influence has its limits. He carries serious weight among the more hardline factions of the IRGC and the broader security establishment, yet he is not a figure who can easily command the full loyalty of the establishment as a whole, let alone Artesh, the regular army, or the civilian bureaucracy. He must, therefore, work alongside Ghalibaf. Vahidi supplies the command structure with military resolve; Ghalibaf offers it political integration. Their roles are not interchangeable, but under wartime conditions, each makes the other more useful.
Beyond the individual personalities, the most important institution coordinating Iran’s security and foreign policy priorities amid the war is the Supreme National Security Council. The council used to be led by Ali Larijani, the formidable political operator and confidant of Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March. His replacement, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, personifies another shift in the Iranian system’s center of gravity, away from political management and toward security-bureaucratic coordination. Zolghadr is the connective tissue of the system, a figure whose role is to ensure that the political, judicial, military, and security arms of the Islamic Republic remain in alignment with one another.
he Aerospace Force has emerged as the most consequential branch of the IRGC, and its commander, Majid Mousavi, has risen through the power networks of the Islamic Republic as a central figure. Mousavi and his Aerospace Force are now crucial to Iran’s projection of deterrence. Within Iran, he is regarded as more willing than his predecessors to expand the use of missiles beyond strictly military targets. More than any other figure, his influence shapes the military tempo and the scope of escalation.
Meanwhile, wars demand complex machinery. The organization responsible for coordinating and managing operations between the IRGC and the regular Iranian army in wartime is known as the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters. The man who runs it, and who completes the operational layer of this command structure, is Ali Abdollahi, an officer whose career spans the IRGC, the national police, the Interior Ministry, and the logistics and operational coordination bureaucracies that hold a wartime state together. He does not make strategy. He makes strategy work.
Ensuring that the security framework is fit for purpose also means keeping a lid on domestic opposition amid the war—a job that now falls to Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of the country’s judiciary. To achieve his goals, he has been using Iran’s sprawling, politically weaponized legal system to prosecute protesters and dissidents, issue warnings against dissent, threaten harsher wartime punishments, and increasingly execute prisoners.
full text https://time.com/article/2026/05/06/irans-new-leaders/
Your comment #2,016 expands on some of the problems I emphasized in my previous comment. The Israeli and our successes in decapitating the leadership, has in fact created added dangers. It appears some of the top leadership recently killed was actually more politically capable than the people who have now replaced them. Successfully Politics includes the ability to yield where necessary to achieve success. If these replacements have their way in “Peace” negotiations, the resulting Iran will be even MORE dangerous than it was before. Thus it is even more important the public supporting both our political parties be educated on the dangers inherent in making peace with these more highly fanatic new leaders.