Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr has been appointed as the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council. Among the many rumors about Sadeq Larijani’s resignation from the head of the Expediency Council, Zolghadr was appointed as the secretary of the council.
Who is Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr?
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr is a former Revolutionary Guards commander and strategic deputy, as well as the head of social protection and crime prevention in the regime’s judiciary.
Zolghadr was born in 1954 in Fasa (Fars’s province). Before the 1979 revolution, he had joined and worked with religious reactionary groups.
For this reason, after the revolution, he joined the so-called Committee of that time which was created by the Hezbollahis, and he began to suppress the people and the regime’s opponents. He then joined the Revolutionary Guards and took charge of training the IRGC forces.
After a while, he became the commander of the IRGC’s irregular warfare camp. Zolghadr’s wife is Sedigheh Beigam Hejazi, who has been working as the director-general of the Office of Women and Family Affairs in the Organization of Islamic Culture and Communication, one of the institutions that are used for the regime’s export of revolution, since the beginning of 2007.
Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr was the head of the IRGC’s Joint Staff for eight years after the war (during Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency). After that, he was the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for another eight years.
Deputy Minister of Security of the Ministry of Interior
In 2005, Zolghadr was appointed Deputy Minister of the Interior to Mostafa Pour Mohammadi, and Deputy Minister of Security and Disciplinary Affairs in the ninth government. At the same time, the public relations of the Ministry of Interior announced that since Zolghadr was acting as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC by order of the Commander-in-Chief Ali Khamenei. He was appointed to the new position with his permission.
Zolghadr was then elected as the social advisor of the judiciary in 2009 by the ruling of Amoli Larijani and has remained in this position until now.
Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr – Organizer of the regime’s plainclothes forces
Zolghadr, like Mohammad Reza Naqdi, was mentioned as one of the organizers of the plainclothes forces, especially the Ansar Hezbollah in the 1990s, and has repeatedly attacked and threatened protesters in post-election events in his speeches
He even said in a speech in Mashhad in mid-September 2009 that “those killed in the ‘hard war’ are among the martyrs and those killed in the ‘soft war’ are among the most hated.”
Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr is also mentioned as one of the commanders who prepared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for power in the 2005 presidential election.
In December 2007, during internal disputes between Khamenei’s faction, which controlled the government, parliament, and judiciary, Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr was dismissed from the Interior Ministry’s deputy for security and law enforcement and transferred to the General Staff of the Armed Forces.
At the same time, he was appointed by Khamenei as ‘Deputy Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces for Basij Affairs.’
UN Security Council Resolution 1747 named Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr as one of the 15 Iranian government officials involved in the nuclear and missile programs and called on UN member states to impose sanctions on travel and financial accounts of these individuals.
