Iran's Hard-Liners Consolidate Power, Vow to Crush Dissent

Six months into the war with the United States, Iran's leadership has hardened around a core of long-serving Revolutionary Guard generals and clerics who are preparing for a drawn-out confrontation with Washington and moving to stamp out unrest at home, the Associated Press reported Saturday from Dubai.

That is a long way from President Donald Trump's early hopes of toppling the Islamic Republic, and from his later claims that "regime change" had pushed more compromising officials to the front.

Iran's new leaders show little faith in any deal with Trump — they were attacked twice while holding talks — and may be bracing for another assault once the US restocks its interceptors, according to the AP.

Who Is Now in Charge

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, issued decrees on Aug. 11 and 12 formally setting Iran's senior leadership, including its top military posts. He took over after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who led Iran for roughly 37 years, was killed in the bombing campaign the US and Israel launched on Feb. 28. Much of the highest echelon of the government was killed with him.

Mohsen Rezaei, 71, is the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. He commanded the Revolutionary Guard through the entire 1980-1988 war with Iraq and until 1997, and has run for president as a hard-line candidate several times since 2009.

Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, 68, was confirmed as head of the Revolutionary Guard, a post he had held on an acting basis since his predecessor was killed alongside the elder Khamenei. Gen. Ali Ozmaei was confirmed as acting commander of the Guard's naval forces and Gen. Ali Abdollahi as military chief of staff.

The most telling appointment, per the AP, was Hossein Taeb, a 63-year-old hard-line cleric, to lead the Basij — the Guard's volunteer street force. Taeb led the Basij when it helped crush the mass protests against hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2009 reelection, in which dozens were killed. He then ran the Guard's intelligence arm for nearly 13 years until he was removed in 2022, reportedly in a shake-up after Israeli espionage successes.

Sascha Bruchmann, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Middle East office in Bahrain, described the new inner circle as "a clique of older senior officers who've served together over the last decades," and said the emphasis appears to be on unity: "It looks like internal cohesion, as in hard core people are being pulled into the inner circle."