Was Firuzabadi Sacked for Buddying up with Rouhani?

The supreme leader has dismissed Major General Hassan Firuzabadi as head of Iran’s General Staff of the Armed Forces. After demoting Firuzabadi, who had been in the job for 27 years, Ayatollah Khamenei re-assigned him the role of “high advisor to the supreme leader” and appointed Major General Mohammad Baghari as the General Staff’s new head.

So what is behind the change? Does the shuffle have anything to do with Firuzabadi’s close links with President Hassan Rouhani, and his long, patchy relationship with the supreme leader, the Revolutionary Guards and the media? A one-time Ahmadinejad supporter, Firuzabadi’s recent allegiances with Rouhani and prominence in nuclear negotiations have not brought him the reputation suitable for levying the supreme leader’s endorsement for the job. 

That Khameini’s appointed Baghari,who formerly worked as head of the General Staff’s deputy office on intelligence and operations, comes as no surprise. He boasts an extensive background in security and intelligence matters, and his brother Hassan Baghari, who lost his life in the Iran-Iraq War in 1982, was also a major figure in Iran’s military establishment. 

The General Staff of the Armed Forces is charged with coordinating the branches of Iran’s military. Established to iron out differences between the Revolutionary Guards and the army, the General Staff works to determine the best interests of the Armed Forces. The first head of the body was Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who also served as prime minister at the same time. Mousavi later ran as a reformist candidate in the 2009 presidential election, and has been under house arrest since 2011.

During Mousavi’s tenure, Firuzabadi sat as the General Staff’s Deputy of Defense. On September 26, 1989, Ali Khamenei elevated him to general leadership of the organization.

Firuzabadi lacks any real military background with the Guards or the regular army, and is not well regarded within the military establishment. He did not fight in the Iran-Iraq War, one of the landmark events in the coming-of-age of the Iranian military.: “I was a [veterinary] doctor and a member of a university scientific panel,” Firuzabadi has said of his career prior to his leadership role for the armed forces. “I spent every year of my life in scientific study, philanthropy, and working toward world peace.” 

He began his work with the Red Crescent and Jihad of Construction, and his most significant contact with the war effort came in his capacity as a coordinator between government institutions and Khatam al-Anbia Construction. Firuzabadi joined the General Staff of the Armed Forces following its incorporation, eventually being appointed the body’s head by Khamenei himself. In 2007, the supreme leader awarded him the rank of Major General. It is said that Khamenei’s trust in Firuzabadi was the key motivating factor in such decisions. 

Silver-tongued Flattery and the “Chief of Meddling”

In return for these good graces, Firuzabadi has been consistently silver-tongued in his flattery of the supreme leader. In his biography, Firuzabadi recounts his participation in Khamenei’s Mashhad courses as part of his own revolutionary curriculum vitae. He interpreted Khamenei’s speeches as imperatives, ordering his subordinates to refer to the supreme leader as “Imam Khamenei” in their office correspondence. He has characterized Khamenei’s military philosophy as the most important factor in the education of the ideal commander. Firuzabadi acknowledged Khamenei’s “Letter to Western Youth” — an open letter published online in 2015 — as “a salve on the torn and troubled hearts of young people in the West.” He has described himself as a “tiny little reed floating in the Imam’s river as it courses toward the heart of the sea,” and Khamenei’s keffiyeh as an “alluring secret bursting with radiance and beatitude.” He has also expressed concern over the fact that people had “fallen behind Imam Khamenei in reading books.” He himself wrote a book entitled Civilization, Religion, and Messianism, which embraced Khamenei’s ideal of the “realization of Islamic civilization.”

In recent years, however, some of Firuzabadi’s public positions have attracted increased attention from the media. One key example was his support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2008, in the run up to the presidential election the following year. Firuzabadi publicly criticized people who he said had tried to engineer the president’s demise by introducing a new candidate to the race. This, he said during a speech, “will not happen.” 

Reformist politician Mehdi Karroubi’s responded to the statements with a sharply-worded letter that proved to be especially scandalous. The letter referred to Firuzabadi as a “Chief of Staff for Military Meddling in Elections,” and questioned whether he had the “impartiality in political questions, agility, and physical mobility” required of his office. It was Karroubi’s satirical references to Firuzabadi’s obesity in particular that would make the general a laughingstock in the press for some time.

But it wasn’t just Karroubi’s letter that caught the media’s eye. Firuzabadi’s own writings – particularly a lengthy July 2009 letter addressed to the “Imam of the Age” following the events of the 2009 presidential election – ensured that his name appeared regularly in new pieces and headlines across Iranian media. 

A New Friend in Rouhani 

But over the past three years, it has been Firuzabadi’s political support of Hassan Rouhani that has made the headlines. Rouhani even featured selections from Firuzabadi’s speeches in one of his 2013 presidential campaign videos, favoring clips that referred to Rouhani’s “thoughtful leadership accompanied by moral sense and amity.” Once again, flattery was at play: Firuzabadi further claimed that “in truth, the nickname ‘Professor of National Security and Crisis Management’ befits Mr. Rouhani.” 

Following Rouhani’s victory, he moved to consolidate their friendship. Bolstered by popular opinion, he defended the administration’s effort to boot the military out of economic affairs, characterized Rouhani’s United Nations address as a “brilliant flash of the Shia clerisy’s rationality at the UN,” and portrayed the president’s diplomacy as a positive and constructive “historic opportunity.” In an April 2014 letter fiercely critical of press outlets aligned with the armed forces, he demanded that such parties “amend their ways” when confronting the administration “lest we collide with them.” In an unequivocal defense of Rouhani, Firuzabadi stated that the nation “ought to take pride in his very existence.” Such words were much welcomed by those with close links to the administration: Rouhani advisor Hesamodin Ashna referred to them as an official command, and Majid Ansari, Deputy of Parliamentary Affairs, characterized such language as an order from Khamenei to media outlets affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. Nonetheless, hardliners refused to recognize any such authority in Firuzabadi, and followed their own path. 

Firuzabadi went on to become a top-level facilitator in nuclear negotiations. “From day one I’ve been on record as someone who thinks of the negotiations as a fine opportunity,” he said in December 2014, further praising “the role of Zarif and his colleagues” in leading the talks, which he saw as central to the Islamic Republic’s “jihad” — summing up Iran’s leaders’ commitment to ensuring they brought the country’s priorities and values to the table. 

At the height of negotiations, on April 5, 2015, Firuzabadi penned a letter congratulating Khamenei on the signing of the Lausanne Statement and the successes of the Iranian nuclear team. This was met with extreme criticism from the radical conservative press, including implicit criticism from Khamenei. In an April 15 letter entitled “Congratulations are meaningless,” the supreme leader brought the tensions between Firuzabadi and himself further into the open, leading to a group of Basij students to pen their own angry letter to the major general.

In response, Firuzabadi published a lengthy treatise in August of 2015 in which he outlined in detail the benefits of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the Security Council resolution, and which he appealed to his critics to recognize. The letter  — like so much of Firuzabadi’s writing — was so detailed that no one had the patience to read to read it in full. 

Then in November 2015, Firuzabadi claimed, contrary to all other Iranian military officials, that Iran was observing the limitations on missile activity laid out in the JCPOA. Revolutionary Guards commanders ignored the claim, and continued with their ballistics tests — actions that understandably proved to be a thorn in the side of the Rouhani administration. 

While advocating for Rouhani over the course of the past three years, Firuzabadi has also taken stands against prominent politician and current leader of the Expediency Council Hashemi Rafsanjani, expressing happiness at his disqualification from the presidential contest. He has found fault with Rafsanjani’s critical references to some of the Islamic Republic’s leadership councils, accusing the veteran cleric of heading “a seditious regime.” Such criticisms were likely meant to restore balance to his political situation and demonstrate loyalty to Khamenei, though it appears that they have not been enough to atone for his support of Rouhani. 

But in the end, Firuzabadi’s reversal of fortunes after 27 years cannot wholly be attributed to his support of Rouhani. Instead, his opponents are well-placed to use his behavior as a much-needed pretext. The truth of the matter is that no one in Iran’s military class takes Firuzabadi seriously. Over the last three years, the Rouhani administration has also strived to used his position as a means of bringing about a partisan balance in domestic politics, but to no avail. If Firuzabadi had commanded more respect from the Guards, the situation might be different, and Rouhani’s administration might have benefited. But it was a strategy that never paid off — and now Rouhani is left with the job of seeing whether he might use Mohammad Baghari to help him pressure the Guards, a new challenge with an unforeseen outcome. ​