DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Hossein Amirabdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister and a hardliner close to the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards who confronted the West while overseeing indirect talks with the U.S. over the country’s nuclear program, arrived in the helicopter crash that occurred that year. also killed the country’s president, state media reported Monday. He was 60.
Amirabdollahian represented the hard shift in Iran following the collapse of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the accord. Amirabdollahian served under President Ebrahim Raisi, a protege of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneiand followed their policies.
However, Amirabdollahian was also involved in efforts to reach a detente with regional rival Saudi Arabia in 2023, a move that was overshadowed months later by tensions arising over the war between Israel and Hamas. But he remained close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and once praised the late Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.
“You should thank the Islamic Republic and Qassem Soleimani, because Soleimani contributed to world peace and security,” Amirabdollahian once said. “If there were no Islamic Republic, your metro stations and assembly centers in Brussels, London and Paris would not be safe.”
Amirabdollahian served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Ali Akbar Salehi from 2011 to 2013. He then returned for a number of years as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mohammed Javad Zarifwho played a key role in the nuclear deal reached under the rule of relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani.
But Zarif and Amirabdollahian fell out, likely due to internal differences in Iran’s foreign policy. Zarif offered him the ambassadorship to Oman, a strategically important post as the sultanate has long been an interlocutor between Iran and the West. But Amirabdollahian refused.
With his election in 2021, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs under Raisi. He supported the Iranian government’s position even as mass protests swept the country in 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman previously arrested for allegedly not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, as ordered by authorities. More than 500 people were killed and more than 22,000 people were arrested during the months-long crackdown by the security services that followed the demonstrations.
In March, a UN investigative panel ruled that Iran was responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Amini’s death.
During the war between Israel and Hamas, Amirabdollahian met with foreign officials and the leader of Hamas. He also threatened retaliation against Israel and praised the attack on Israel in April. He also oversaw Iran’s response to a brief exchange of airstrikes with Iran’s nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan and worked on diplomacy with the Taliban in Afghanistan, with whom Iran had tense relations.
Amirabdollhian is survived by his wife and two children.
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Amir Vahdat contributed to this report from Tehran, Iran.
