Mohsen Rezaee Height, Age, Wife, Children, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Mohsen Rezaee

• Mohsen Rezaee was born into a religious Persian family, he grew up in this oil rich town in southwestern Iran, and along with his close friends he set up the Religion and Science Association from his early years itself.

• At 15 he moved to Ahvaz for high school at an institution run by the National Iranian Oil Company, and it was here that his struggle against the Shah’s regime began.

• SAVAK picked him up in his final year there.

• He was just 17 when he spent five months in solitary confinement, and prison did nothing to slow him down once he got out.

• He married in 1974 and reached Tehran the same year to study mechanical engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology, working alongside his studies.

• SAVAK kept up its crackdown on guerrilla groups, and since Rezaee belonged to one, he had to abandon his degree midway.

• He went on to launch provincial branches of the Mansouroun guerrilla fighters across seven provinces, and when Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile, this group took charge of protecting him.

• After the 1979 revolution, seven armed Muslim outfits joined forces to form the Islamic Revolution Mujahideen Organisation, and Rezaee threw in his lot with the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organisation.

• He also entered the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, rising to chief of its intelligence wing before Khomeini named him IRGC commander in 1980.

• Barely 27, he took over as commander in chief on 20 September 1981 and held the post through the entire Iran and Iraq war.

• Those years earned him a reputation as a war hawk who pushed for fighting on indefinitely, even once Iraqi troops had been pushed out of Iranian soil, a stand that suited Khomeini and, many believe, also suited the IRGC’s own ambitions within the state.

• Not everyone agreed. Ninety IRGC commanders wrote to Khomeini in 1984 asking him to rein Rezaee in, and Khomeini responded by purging the dissenters instead.

• Made a member of the Supreme Defense Council in 1986, Rezaee fell into open conflict with land forces commander Ali Sayad Shirazi over war strategy, a rift serious enough that Khomeini summoned both men and told them bluntly that infighting among the Guards, the army and the Basij would doom everyone and leave them answerable before God.

• By 1988, with victory slipping further away, Rezaee had changed his tune completely, writing to Khomeini that the war against Iraq could not be won.

• His IRGC career ended in 1997, pushed out by pressure from allies of the newly elected president Mohammad Khatami and by criticism over his handling of a perceived US threat, and Yahya Rahim Safavi took his place.

• That same August he joined the Expediency Discernment Council and soon became its secretary, a post he kept until 2021, while also chairing its commission on macroeconomics and commerce.

• Around this time he switched academic tracks too, moving from mechanical engineering to economics at Tehran University, a PhD following in 2001.

• In 2002 he launched the news website Tabnak, originally called Baztab, as a counter to the growing tribe of reformist sites, and alongside all this he co founded and taught at Imam Hossein University.

• He tried for the presidency in 2005 but pulled out just two days before the vote, on 15 June, saying he wanted the nation’s votes to stay unified and count for something.

• Trouble of a different kind arrived in November 2006, when an Argentine judge issued international warrants against Rezaee and seven others over the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, an attack on a Jewish cultural centre that killed 85 people and came just two years after a bombing of the Israeli embassy in the same city.

• His own son Ahmad had defected to the US in 1998 and told American officials that his father had planned the embassy attack from Tehran, even claiming he had travelled with him to Lebanon to witness training.

• Ahmad returned home in 2005 and took it all back, calling his earlier claims baseless.

• Interpol was not so easily swayed, placing Rezaee on its wanted list from March 2007 and issuing a Red Notice against him the same year over the bombing case.

• The 2009 race saw him back in the contest, entering formally on 23 April after failing to find another conservative willing to challenge Ahmadinejad, whose Holocaust remarks Rezaee had already dismissed as unhelpful for Iran’s standing abroad.

• He finished third with 1.7 percent of the vote behind Ahmadinejad and reformist runner up Mir Hossein Mousavi.

• That August he also wrote to condemn, as secretary of the Expediency Council, the ongoing trials of what he called so called prisoners, and by June he was publicly rejecting the AMIA charges once more as a sheer lie.

• Ahmad Rezaee’s story took a darker turn after he moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2011.

• His body turned up in a Dubai hotel that November, and while some reports pointed to a hotel employee, Dubai Police put the cause down to an overdose of antidepressants.

• Rezaee entered the 2013 race in October 2012 and went on to poll 3,884,412 votes, finishing fourth behind Hassan Rouhani, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Saeed Jalili.

• His brother Omidvar had already been sitting in Iran’s parliament since 2008, and by 2015 reports suggested Rezaee himself had returned to the IRGC fold.

• He ruled himself out of the 2017 race in December 2016, though by February he was hedging, telling reporters he would consider running if the Popular Front of Islamic Revolutionary Forces asked him to.

• His politics kept their hard edge through 2019, when he said he hoped Iran would one day put Donald Trump on trial, and the US responded in January 2020 by sanctioning him under Executive Order 13876 for advancing what the Treasury called Iran’s destabilising objectives.

• The 2021 election brought his closest finish yet, second place to Ebrahim Raisi, who won outright in the first round with 3.4 million votes more than Rezaee could muster, a tally even lower than his 2013 showing.

• He then served as Vice President for Economic Affairs from 2021 to 2023.

• Rezaee returned to the headlines on 16 June 2025, mid way through the Israel Iran conflict, claiming on state television that Pakistan had promised a nuclear strike on Israel if Israel used nuclear weapons first, a claim Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif flatly denied.

• By March 2026, he had picked up a new role as military adviser to supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

• In August that year came word from President Pezeshkian’s office that he would take over as Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council following Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr‘s resignation, with a separate Khamenei decree naming him the Supreme Leader’s personal representative to the council.

• He also sits on the Expediency Discernment Council, heads the Supreme Council for Economic Coordination as its secretary, runs the government’s Economic Committee in the same capacity and still reviews Iran’s 2025 development plan.