Who was Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of Iran’s military, killed by Israel?

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 spoke to AFP 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 did Netanyahu say?

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.

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 was a senior Iranian military officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Since 2016, Bagheri 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 the 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 the 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 ones.

Bagheri's elder brother, Hassan Bagheri, who was born as Gholam-Hossein Afshordi, was a prominent IRGC commander killed during the Iran-Iraq War.

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.

Sanctioned by US in 2019

Bagheri was sanctioned by the US in 2019, when the first Donald Trump government imposed sanctions against what they called the ‘inner circle’ of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The European Union also sanctioned Bagheri for supplying Russia with drones, while he was further sanctioned by the US, Canada and the United Kingdom for his role in the crackdown on the 2022 protests in Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman.

After Bagheri’s assassination, Iran appointed Ahmad Vahidi, a former defence and interior minister, as his interim replacement.