Shiite Muslim scholar Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour helped establish the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah while serving as Iran’s ambassador to Syria, and was lost in a book bomb allegedly placed by Israel He lost his right hand and died of the coronavirus on Monday. He is 74 years old.

As a close ally of Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhola Khomeini, Mokhta Shamipur formed alliances with armed groups across the Middle East in the 1970s.

After the Islamic Revolution, he helped establish a paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran, and as the ambassador to Syria, he brought this force into the region to help form Hezbollah.

In his later years, he slowly joined the reformist cause in Iran, hoping to change the theocracy of the Islamic Republic from within.

He supports opposition leaders Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mahdi Karubi Iran’s green movement Protests sparked after the controversial re-election of then President Ahmadinejad in 2009.

“If all the people are aware of this, avoid violent measures and continue to engage in civil confrontations, they will win,” Mohtashamipour said at the time, although Ahmadinejad will eventually remain in office. “No power can stand up to people’s will.”

The state-run Islamic Republic of Iran news agency reported on Monday that Motashamipur died in a hospital in northern Tehran after contracting the virus.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani expressed their condolences on the death of Mokhta Shamipur.

Khamenei said that Mota Samipur provided various “revolutionary services”, which eventually caused him to be injured in “terrorist acts.”

Rouhani called him an important ally of the late supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, and said that Mukhta Samipur devoted his life to “realizing the lofty goals of revolution and Islamic establishment” inside and outside Iran.

Descendants of the Prophet

Wearing a black headscarf, this Muslim scholar indicates in Shia tradition that he is a direct descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He has lived in the holy Shia city of Najaf in Iraq for the past 10 years after the disputed elections in Iran. .

The head of the hardline judiciary, Ibrahim Raisi, who is now considered the main candidate for Iran’s presidential election next week, expressed his condolences to Motashamipur’s family.

According to the news agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Raisi said: “The deceased was one of the holy fighters on the way to liberate Jerusalem and one of the pioneers in the fight against the usurpation of the Zionist regime.”

Mohtashamipour was born in Tehran in 1947 when the Muslim scholar met Khomeini while exiled in Najaf after being expelled from Iran by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) .

In the 1970s, he talked to armed groups in the Middle East and helped the future Islamic Republic of Iran form an alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighting Israel.

After being arrested by Iraq, Mokhta Samipur found his way to Khomeini’s residence in exile outside Paris. During the Islamic Revolution in 1979, they returned to Iran triumphantly.

In 1982, Khomeini deployed Mukhta Shamipur to Syria and then under the strongman Hafez al-Assad.

Although ostensibly a diplomat, Mohtashamipour oversaw the influx of millions of people who funded IRGC operations in the area.

Lebanon was controlled by Syria at the time, and tens of thousands of soldiers were deployed there. In 1982, when Israel was pursuing the PLO on its territory, Lebanon found itself invaded by Israel.

Iran’s support flowed into the Shi’ite community under Israeli occupation—it helped create a new organization called Hezbollah or the “God’s Party”.

The United States accuses Hezbollah of being responsible for 63 deaths in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the subsequent bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in the Lebanese capital that killed 241 American soldiers and another attack that killed 58 French paratroopers .

Hezbollah and Iran denied involvement.

“The court found that Hezbollah and its agents received substantial material and technical support from the Iranian government, which is beyond doubt,” US District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote in 2003.

Lambers quoted the opinion of a US naval intelligence officer who directly named Mohtashamipour. He was told by Tehran to contact the nascent Hezbollah, “inciting attacks on the multinational alliance in Lebanon and’taking spectacular action against the US Marine Action'”.

bombing

In Mohtashamipour’s obituary, the News Agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran described him only as “one of the founders of Hezbollah in Lebanon” and accused Israel of causing the bombing that wounded him.

It did not discuss the US allegations of his involvement in suicide bombings against Americans.

According to the book “Rise and Kill First,” written by journalist Ronan Bergman about the Israeli assassination, the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency had acquired the then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (Yitzhak) at the time of his assassination. Shamir) can hunt down Mota Shamir.

Bergman wrote that they chose to send the bomb hidden in a book described as “an English masterpiece about the shrines of Shiites in Iran and Iraq” on Valentine’s Day in 1984.

When Mohtashamipour opened the book, the bomb exploded, tearing off two fingers from his right and left hands.

But he survived and later became Iran’s interior minister and served as a hardline member of parliament before joining the reformists in 2009.