Iran's President Died in a Helicopter Crash — Here's Why It Matters

On the nineteenth of May, 2024, breaking news out of Tehran reported a helicopter crash. Details were hazy, the cause of the crash was murky, but one thing was known for certain: that a man named Ebrahim Raisi was on board. Raisi was, at that time, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Raisi perished in the helicopter crash, one of eight souls on board, all of whom were lost at the crash site. It was the highest-profile death of a major world leader in the last decade, and one that came at an already-critical moment not just for Iran, but for the entire Middle East.

Key Takeaways

• President Ebrahim Raisi and seven others, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, died on May 19, 2024 when their Bell 212 helicopter crashed in heavy fog near the Azerbaijan border.
• The helicopter was estimated to be forty to fifty years old, with parts in short supply due to international sanctions and safety checks described as lacking at best.
• Ayatollah Ale-Hashem survived the initial crash and answered phone calls for three hours before dying, telling rescuers he was alone under trees and could see no one else.
• Iran quickly ruled out foul play, though Turkey reported the helicopter’s transponder was either turned off or absent, raising questions about IRGC operational policies.
• Interim president Mohammad Mokhber and interim foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani were appointed pending elections scheduled for June 28, 2024.
• Raisi had been widely considered a potential successor to the 85-year-old Supreme Leader Khamenei, and his death reopened the succession question in favor of Khamenei’s son Mojtaba.

The Crash and the Desperate Search for Survivors

For President Raisi, May the nineteenth would have seemed like any other day in Iran’s second-highest office. On that day, he was scheduled to have a meeting with the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, in order to inaugurate the Giz Galasi hydroelectric complex. That complex, a massive embankment dam, straddles the Aras River, which, in turn, defines the international border between Azerbaijan and Iran. On the Iranian side, that’s a relatively remote region, some several hundred miles from the capital city of Tehran. To get to the dam, Raisi boarded one in a convoy of three Bell 212-model helicopters, a machine estimated to be about forty or fifty years old. Like the rest of Iran’s aircraft, especially Western-made ones like the Bell 212, parts are often in short supply for the aging aircraft on account of international sanctions, and safety checks are often lacking at best. But nonetheless, the helicopter and its two counterparts were trusted to get Raisi to the dam, which, by all accounts, they did quite successfully. Also onboard the chopper was Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who had held his post since 2021. A representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was riding alongside them, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem. So was Malek Rahmati, the Governor-General of East Azerbaijan Province — which is, to be clear, located in Iran, not Azerbaijan. Raisi was joined by the head of his security team, Brigadier General Mohammad Mehdi Mousavi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Also onboard were three members of the flight crew: two pilots, each holding the rank of colonel in the Iranian Air Force, and an Iranian Air Force major serving as the flight technician. After a successful meeting and dam inauguration ceremony, all eight loaded up into their helicopter, to join their convoy en route to the city of Tabriz, where Raisi was due to inaugurate a project at the local oil refinery. But at 13:30, local time, catastrophe struck. The area that the helicopter convoy was to be traveling through had been issued a weather warning the day prior, and conditions on the flight were expected to consist of heavy fog and rain. According to Iranian state media, the pilot of Raisi’s helicopter had directed the convoy to climb and pass over a specific nearby cloud, but some thirty seconds later, one of the other helicopter pilots observed that the president’s chopper had disappeared. When the crash happened, it took place about 58 kilometers or 36 miles south of the convoy’s point of departure, just southwest of a small village called Uzi.

A Frantic Rescue Operation Ends in Tragedy

News wouldn’t break for two and a half hours in Tehran, but when it did, that news was immediately discouraging: the helicopter carrying President Raisi had been forced to make a hard landing under unclear circumstances, forced down due to the weather conditions. Immediately after the crash took place, search operations began to try and locate the president and the other passengers onboard. The two helicopters that had accompanied Raisi spent some fifteen to twenty minutes searching fruitlessly for the crash site before making emergency landings and continuing their search on foot. Rescue teams attempted to make it to the area where the crash was suspected to have taken place. But between the weather conditions and the rugged, mountainous local terrain, neither the ground teams nor the people onboard the other two helicopters were able to locate the crash site. Shortly after the president’s helicopter disappeared, the other members of the convoy had been able to contact the downed aircraft, where Ayatollah Ale-Hashem was able to pick up the phone and confirm that the helicopter had crashed in a valley. In a subsequent call, Ale-Hashem had been unable to provide information on any other survivors; quoting a call transcript of his statements, “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know where I am, I’m under trees, I don’t know, I don’t see anyone, I’m alone.” Ale-Hashem would continue answering calls for some three hours, but died before rescuers could reach his position. Over the course of the next day, search-and-rescue parties would struggle through heavy fog to locate the crash site, despite the involvement of some forty teams dispatched from the Iranian Red Crescent, and additional support via unmanned drones. The operation quickly went international, featuring airplanes, helicopters, and personnel sent from Russia, a night-vision helicopter and drone support from Turkey, and rapid satellite mapping from the European Union. The United States received a request from Iran to help in the search, although a spokesman from the US State Department claimed that logistical issues prevented the US from actually contributing any meaningful support. Several hours after search operations began, the helicopter was located at an altitude of 2,200 meters, or 7,200 feet, and the situation was grim. Other than the tail section, the helicopter had been entirely incinerated in the crash, with no survivors at the crash site.

Ruling Out Foul Play and the Question of the Transponder

By the following day, all eight bodies had been recovered and transported to the city of Tabriz, and Raisi’s death would be publicly confirmed another day after that. Despite Iran’s long and adversarial history with a variety of world nations, some of whom have proved particularly adept in the art of assassination, the country was nonetheless quick to rule out foul play in the crash. By all accounts, the crash of Raisi’s helicopter was genuinely accidental, and although the precise root cause of the accident has yet to be identified — as either mechanical failure, pilot error, a weather event, or something else — Iran has apparently seen no reason to point the finger at any bad actor. Additional information coming from Turkey has indicated that the helicopter’s transponder may either have been turned off or simply not present onboard the aircraft in the first place, with either possibility perhaps signaling less-than-perfect helicopter operation policies among the IRGC. But regardless of the root cause, the overall state of affairs was crystal-clear: Iran’s president, its foreign minister, a regional governor, and a representative of the Supreme Leader himself had died, with an entire nation left reeling in the aftermath. The funeral of Ebrahim Raisi was an appropriately somber affair in Tehran, where Supreme Leader Khamenei led tens of thousands of mourners through the rites of a grand funeral. The others killed in the crash were honored there too, in caskets draped with Iranian flags, while on Raisi’s coffin, a black turban had been placed to signify his direct descent from the bloodline of the prophet Muhammad. When the ceremony concluded, mourners carried the eight coffins out on their shoulders as crowds outside chanted “Death to America.” The coffins were then brought on a semi-truck for a procession through Tehran, eventually reaching the city’s Freedom Square. The funeral saw representatives from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as the nation’s state and non-state allies from around the world, from Russia and China, to Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Qatar, to even Hezbollah and Hamas. A mourning period was declared to last five days, with Raisi eventually laid to rest on Thursday, the twenty-third.

Raisi’s Rise: From the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ to the Presidency

In order to truly understand what the death of Raisi meant for Iran, one must understand the true nature of what Raisi was in life: not just Iran’s president, but something more. Raisi was 63 years old at the time of his death, nearly three years into a presidential term that began in August of 2021, but by the time he was elected, he had already spent years considered by Western analysts to be both a protégé, and a potential successor, to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei himself. Raisi had studied as a cleric since the age of fifteen, and he had earned notoriety among the international community while still in his twenties, where his role as deputy prosecutor general on a commission that called for the execution of Iranian political prisoners in 1988 earned him the nickname, the “Butcher of Tehran.” He also earned a whole laundry list of accusations of crimes against humanity by the UN, with the full extent of his actions not coming to light until the 2010s. After his butchering days, he served as Iran’s Chief Justice, its Attorney General, and as a presidential candidate in an unsuccessful 2017 bid for Iran’s highest office, where he lost to a moderate candidate named Hassan Rouhani. When it came time to run again in 2021, the elections that time around were widely considered by international observers to have been rigged in Raisi’s favor as a number of moderates and reformists were barred from participation. During his time in office, Raisi presided over a wide variety of crises. He oversaw Iran’s forever-stalled nuclear deal with the United States — which was just as dead-in-the-water on the day Raisi died as on the day he took office. He oversaw Iran’s relationships with both state and non-state allies across the Middle East, and tried to work Iran through a period of rather intense economic turmoil. Perhaps most defining of his presidency, Raisi presided over intense unrest surrounding an anti-government protest movement in 2022, following the death of a young woman named Mahsa Amini as a result of police brutality. Raisi also navigated the stormy waters of the Israel-Hamas War. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many experts suspect that Raisi’s death wasn’t such unwelcome news among Iranian civilians — a suspicion borne out, at least somewhat, by the fact that Raisi’s funeral proceedings had none of the fire or passion that the Iranian public displayed after the 2020 death of Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qasem Soleimani.

Accident, Assassination, or Internal Sabotage?

As for whether anyone might have wanted explicitly to see Raisi dead, it is difficult to say. Certainly, Israel would be the immediately obvious suspect in any high-profile assassination of an Iranian leader, but Iran appears unwilling to entertain the idea that any hidden hand might have been behind the crash. If history is any indicator, Iran would be loathe to admit that Israel had carried out a successful presidential assassination on its territory, but at least according to Israel’s allies abroad, there’s no intelligence to suggest that Israel was behind the incident. Of course, that’s all a matter of what Israel’s allies are inclined to disclose, and there is a lot of wiggle room between that metric, and what would be defined as objective truth. But the fact remains that at least as of now, there’s no indicator that Israel or any other adversary was behind the helicopter crash. There is one other possibility to consider: that perhaps an act of sabotage was to blame, but one that came from within Iran, rather than from without. It would be unusual, in such a stable autocracy as Iran, for one of Raisi’s rivals to think that they could take this shot at him and get away with it, but that’s not the only vector from which Raisi could conceivably have come under attack. This is a figure who was widely understood to have been anointed to the Iranian presidency, a clear potential successor to the Ayatollah, but he was also a figure with a whole lot of leverage, courtesy of his public office. With Iran’s behind-the-scenes palace intrigue remaining as notoriously opaque as always, it’s not inconceivable that something behind the scenes may have made the Ayatollah and his mullahs regret having allowed Raisi to rise to such prominence. If that were the case, then airplane and helicopter accidents are a tried-and-true method of enemy disposal. Adding to the list of reasons to be suspicious is the aforementioned lack of a signal coming from the helicopter’s transponder after the crash, at least according to Turkey. If a transponder was indeed aboard, then someone, for some reason, would have needed to disable it — and simply trying to hide Raisi’s movements for security’s sake, in his own nation as he travels between scheduled public appearances, is not a compelling counterargument. But with this theory, too, there are a number of confounding variables to consider — chief among them, the fact that Raisi was not the only casualty of the crash. The leader of East Azerbaijan Province, Malek Rahmati, is not known to have had any meaningful level of political association with Raisi, and the ayatollah who was killed, Ale-Hashem, was a direct representative of the Supreme Leader himself. For Raisi’s death to have been arranged in such a way would still be very odd — especially considering that Raisi likely takes plenty of trips airborne where other officials would not be traveling with him. So, as fair as it may be to entertain the possibility that someone took steps to bring about Raisi’s demise, that simply doesn’t appear to be the likeliest possibility.

Matters of Succession: Iran’s Next President and Supreme Leader

Whether accident or sabotage is ultimately to blame for Ebrahim Raisi’s death, the fundamental reality remains the same: Raisi is dead, meaning that the question first and foremost on the minds of all watching from around the world should be, what happens next? With Raisi in particular, that’s a question that really comprises two questions: Who is going to be Iran’s next president, and who, if not Raisi, is going to be the Supreme Leader’s chosen successor? The nation’s interim president has already been appointed, Mohammad Mokhber, while Iran’s new interim foreign minister is Ali Bagheri Kani. Both men are expected to serve for up to a fifty-day span in their interim role, by which time Iran will hold a cycle of elections and choose a new president. As of now, that election is scheduled to go down on June 28. Conservative candidates are expected to have the advantage in the upcoming election, owing to their alignment with Iran’s domestic and international priorities and the general approach that the Supreme Leader currently favors. Mokhber is widely regarded as more of a technocrat than a populist; he has stayed largely out of the public eye despite his role as First Vice President prior to Raisi’s death, and he is generally regarded as a caretaker during this sensitive stretch of time — a person that the Ayatollah can trust not to set anything on fire, but not exactly the figure who Khamenei would be looking to partner with for the long term. His credentials include past roles at the heads of several charitable bonyad organizations within Iran — particularly, one that the US Treasury has condemned for systemic land and property confiscations against Iranian dissidents, exiles, and religious minorities. The country’s recent past presidents, Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have long since fallen out of favor with the Ayatollah, and aren’t expected to have either the political capital or the will to try and seek election again. Far harder to answer is the question of who will guide Iran after its current Supreme Leader eventually dies. By all outward indicators, that date will come sooner than later; Ayatollah Khamenei is 85 years old, and has long been rumored to be in poor health. With Raisi gone, the next-most-likely potential successor for the Ayatollah may be his own son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a now 54-year-old cleric who has largely kept to the shadows. Mojtaba is a war veteran, having served in the Iran-Iraq War, and was understood to have played a leading role in the effort to elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as to repress public discontent after Ahmadinejad was elected. He was also accused by the former president of embezzling state funds. These days, Mojtaba is a theology teacher, understood to control significant financial assets on behalf of his family, and he maintains close connections with important figures in the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Mojtaba Problem and the Founding Principles of the Republic

Even before Raisi’s death, it was Mojtaba who was seen as the next-most-likely successor in Iran, and now, Mojtaba likely has reason to believe that his way is clear to the mantle of Supreme Leader. However, experts on Iran tell a different story, suggesting that the cleric elites who run the nation are not inclined to establish a system in which familial lineage is the determining factor to anoint a person as Supreme Leader. Plenty of clerics within Iran have Mojtaba beat in just about every critical metric and qualification to be Supreme Leader, other than being the current Leader’s own son. Those clerics exist inside a system, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that included among its founding principles the idea that hereditary rule should be abolished. For Mojtaba to become Supreme Leader would amount to a fundamental violation of that system, even if he were the clear best candidate for the role, which he isn’t. Mojtaba might be a savvy political operator, but he’s not a high-ranking cleric, and under the current system, that should be enough to immediately disqualify him. With Mojtaba hypothetically removed or omitted from contention, it’s difficult to identify a specific mullah who’s most likely to guide Iran into the future. According to some clerical sources, the Ayatollah himself is firmly opposed to seeing his son become Supreme Leader, indicating that even if Raisi was Khamenei’s prior top pick, there are probably at least a couple of other names on the shortlist. But whether the Supreme Leader would wish for Mojtaba to butt out, or not, the reality of it is that Khamenei will be dead by the time Mojtaba is in a position to cause chaos — and if he chooses to do so, then his connections to the Iranian military could become very important, very quickly. If Iran is to avoid that outcome, then something will need to change soon, or else the current Supreme Leader may die before anything can be done to stop Mojtaba from making his play for authority.

Iran’s Foreign Policy Posture: Will Anything Actually Change?

Now that Iran’s new predicament can be examined in full view, one critical question looms above all the others: Will anything change in Iran? The answer, while rather complex and nuanced, boils down to a single overarching point: that if things change for Tehran and the nation it oversees, then it will be because Iran’s clerical elites decided to make a change — not as a knee-jerk reaction or an attempt to deal with instability after Raisi’s demise. The death of Raisi, alongside the death of his foreign minister, comes at a time when Iran has been going out of its way to influence the state of affairs across the Middle East. Under Raisi’s leadership, Iran has been the primary backer of Yemen’s Houthi rebels and their attacks on international maritime shipping in the Red Sea. So, too, has Iran propped up Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization, and both reined in, and egged on a range of allied militias in Iraq and Syria. On Raisi’s watch, Iran strengthened its ties with Syria’s Assad regime, while working to influence Iraqi politics and bring the nation more fully under its more powerful neighbor’s sway. And perhaps most important of all, while it’s unclear just how much Raisi and his allies knew about the Hamas organization’s October 7 terror attack before it happened, it’s abundantly clear that Raisi and his now-deceased foreign minister worked hard to ensure that Hamas could carry on the fight even despite a crushing ongoing counteroffensive by Israel. But while it’s undeniably true that Raisi oversaw Iran’s actions across the Middle East, it’s more difficult to establish whether those actions were Raisi’s own policies, or ones where he served as the public face of an effort that would have happened with or without him. Iran’s government is fundamentally unlike those of many other world nations; it’s strictly authoritarian, and relies on a large, but closed circle of elites around the Supreme Leader to make decisions that will guide the nation on its path. The people placed into positions of high political authority are the ones tasked with carrying out Iran’s objectives, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the policies they’re enacting are ones that they came up with — or even that they necessarily agree with. More plausible is the prospect that Iran’s international posture will remain more or less consistent with what it’s been for the last few years. After all, it’s the Supreme Leader’s take on things that ultimately matters most, and if the Ayatollah was into Iran’s current strategic posture when Raisi was in charge, there’s little reason to think that that might change now. Raisi was not a true decision-maker; he could choose whose hands to shake or which factories and dams to visit, but he was powerless to act against the authority of the Supreme Leader. Whoever claims the presidency next will have to do the same thing. With or without Ebrahim Raisi, Iran remains at the center of a vast network across the Middle East, and the havoc that Iran’s network has wrought thus far amongst the members of its global neighborhood won’t be stopping anytime soon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who runs the Islamic Republic of Iran?

The Islamic Republic of Iran is run by a complex system of government, with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei serving as the Supreme Leader, and the President, who was Ebrahim Raisi until his death on May 19, 2024, in a helicopter crash. The government also includes other key figures such as the Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who also died in the crash, and representatives of the Supreme Leader like Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem.

What is the difference between Iran and the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Iran and the Islamic Republic of Iran refer to the same country, with Iran being the official name and the Islamic Republic of Iran being the country’s full official name, reflecting its system of government based on Islamic law. The country has been known as the Islamic Republic of Iran since the 1979 revolution, and it borders several countries including Iraq, Turkey, and Azerbaijan.

How was Iran’s president killed?

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash on May 19, 2024, while traveling to the Giz Galasi hydroelectric complex to meet with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. The helicopter, a 40-50 year old Bell 212 model, crashed near the village of Uzi in East Azerbaijan, Iran, due to unclear circumstances, possibly related to bad weather or mechanical issues.

Who were the Iranians killed in the helicopter crash?

The Iranians killed in the helicopter crash included President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem, a representative of the Supreme Leader, Malek Rahmati, the Governor-General of East Azerbaijan Province, Brigadier General Mohammad Mehdi Mousavi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and three members of the flight crew: two Iranian Air Force colonels and one major.

Why did Osama bin Laden’s helicopter crash?

There is no information available about Osama bin Laden being involved in a helicopter crash. The provided context refers to the death of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19, 2024.

Who is the new president of Iran?

The context does not provide information on who has succeeded Ebrahim Raisi as the President of Iran after his death in the helicopter crash on May 19, 2024. However, it is mentioned that experts explain who is in charge in the interim following Raisi’s death.

What caused the Iran helicopter crash?

The cause of the Iran helicopter crash that killed President Ebrahim Raisi on May 19, 2024, is unclear, but it is believed to be related to bad weather, possibly heavy fog and rain, or mechanical issues with the 40-50 year old Bell 212 helicopter, which was exacerbated by a lack of maintenance and safety checks due to international sanctions.

Which president died in the plane crash in 2024?

It was not a plane crash, but a helicopter crash that occurred on May 19, 2024, and it was Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi who died in the crash, along with seven other people, near the village of Uzi in East Azerbaijan, Iran.

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