As a new Islamic Republic took hold in Tehran by late 1979, it became clear to many Iranians that the revolutionary moment offered an opportunity. In a nascent ideological system, being associated with the birth of its soon-to-be-established institutions would link individual and national pride and ensure a place in history. For some, this was a central motivation, while for others, this was simply an ancillary effect of devoting their energies to building a new state and system. Combined with the fact that Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched an invasion into Iran merely 10 months after the Islamic Republic's establishment, a strong nationalistic zeal combined with this energy for many.
Ahmad Shahcheraghi of Shiraz, which is home to the "Shah Cheragh" (King of the Light) shrine, was fuelled by this impulse enough to join the newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1979. Joining this ideological paramilitary sworn to defending the Islamic Republic's nezam (rule), which would eventually grow into Iran's singular most powerful politico-military institution, Shahcheraghi changed his surname to "Vahidi", meaning 'The One/First'. This month, Vahidi was officially appointed as the Chief of the IRGC, under a new Supreme Leader, in the midst of an existential war with the United States and Israel, and when millions of Iranians are reminiscing the nationalistic zeal spawned by Iran's last existential war against Iraq 47 years ago. Vahidi himself, as the de facto IRGC Chief since early March, was instrumental in the accession of the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Between 1979 and 2026, Vahidi was part of many firsts. In a reasonably competitive environment for aspiring military leaders, Vahidi was appointed as the Intelligence Deputy to IRGC Chief Mohsen Rezaee in 1981, within two years of joining the force. By 1988, he had become the first Commander of the IRGC's Quds Force. Styled as a liberation force for Jerusalem, the Quds Force became the spearhead for financing, equipping, and training armed "resistance" groups abroad. While the force reached its zenith under Vahidi's successor and the more popular Qassem Soleimani (1998-2020), it was Vahidi who established its initial operations and vision. He focused especially on Lebanon, where Iran's relationship with Hezbollah was still at a formative stage.
Later, he became the first Cabinet Minister to be appointed with a live INTERPOL Red Notice against him when President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad appointed him Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics in 2009. Notably, with the exception of a stint as Deputy for Planning in the Defense Ministry under Mohammad Khatami, Vahidi only served in government under conservative administrations; he was Chief Deputy Minister of Defense during Ahmedinejad's first term, and later Interior Minister from 2021 under President Ebrahim Raisi. Moreover, Vahidi was among the first targets for several sanctions regimes besides the INTERPOL Red Notice. This included European Union sanctions since 2008, as well as US Sanctions for weapons proliferation from 2010 onwards.
More importantly, however, Vahidi's career reflects complicated characteristics. He has been at the center of both neat victories for the Islamic Republic as well as challenges. And both have proven him to be a risk-taking General, with an ability to rise out of controversies.
A Complicated Tenure
Among the several developments that gave Ahmad Vahidi a certain prominence across his career, it was his tenure as the Quds Force chief that stood out. Apart from leveraging the erstwhile Shah's own apparatus for building ties with non-state groups in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, Vahidi was aware of the Quds Force's peculiar position in the early 1990s. At a time when Iran was rebuilding and socially nursing itself after a bloody and protracted ten-year war imposed on the nascent Islamic Republic by Iraq, Vahidi ensured that the Quds Force capitalised on the expeditionary fervour that was generated across the war years.
Consequently, it was under Vahidi's leadership that the Quds Force embarked on its first major intervention - in the Bosnian civil war, in favour of President Alija Izetbegovic. While this represented a deepening of what the author Aarash Azizi terms the "Tehran-Sarajevo" alliance, it became evident that the Quds Force was too unnatural a partner for a conflict-scape that featured a motley of fighting groups, dominated to an extent by Al Qaeda. The latter's well-known revulsion towards Shia Muslims, despite occasional tactical cooperation in Bosnia, combined with Bosnian broad disinterest, meant that Bosnia never saw the Quds Force success that Lebanon saw across the 1980s, and which Afghanistan was to see under Soleimani as Quds Force Chief (such as through Iran's partnership with the Northern Alliance under the Taliban). To contrast the Bosnia experience further, note that Soleimani guided Iran's (brief) cooperation with the US against the Taliban in Afghanistan, in exchange for the US helping Iran with intelligence vis-a-vis Al Qaeda cells.
However, despite the Bosnian failure, Vahidi remained actively involved on the Lebanon front, nourishing the operational relationship with Hezbollah. In 2006, Argentina formally charged Ahmad Vahidi, among others, with being the mastermind of a Hezbollah attack against the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994. While this would become an enduring bone of contention between Iran and Argentina (including a botched attempt at jointly investigating the attack, in 2013), it did not fundamentally alter Vahidi's prominence within the IRGC. In fact, the 1994 bombing was also linked to both Rafsanjani and Mohsen Rezaee, based especially on the testimony of Ahmed Rezaee - Mohsen's eldest son, who defected to the United States in 1998 (a year after his father demitted office as IRGC Chief). This only meant that international charges against figures like Vahidi were seen as proof of external, malignant, conspiracies rather than as obstacles for Iran's partnerships.
Commitment to Missiles
During his time in the Defense Ministry, Vahidi's public utterances showed that he was always a believer in missiles and drones as the principal instruments of "resistance" warfare. In 2012, Vahidi oversaw a programme to upgrade the Fatah-110, one of Iran's first solid-fuelled missiles, to a range of 300 km. Iran's advancements in missilery had meant that then, too, the risk of an imminent Israeli attack on Iranian systems was expected - a fact documented in multiple contemporary reports in Israeli media. Vahidi himself had been specifically linking Iranian missile advancement with its need to defend specifically against Israel. A year earlier, he had asserted that an Israeli attack on Iran "would be suicide", stating Israel would face "deadly strikes" that would make it "unstable", linking this to Iran's indigenous drone and combat aircraft manufacturing. By 2013, Vahidi was also integrally involved in pushing for the development of indigenous Iranian air defence capabilities (such as the system that later became the Bavar-373), based on Russian S-200 and S-300 designs that themselves became available to Iran only after US sanctions were lifted briefly in 2015.
Crucially, Vahidi's focus was not restricted to missilery alone. It extended to Iran's nuclear programme, which he was tasked with protecting through counter-intelligence operations. As a veteran of the IRGC's intelligence office, he reportedly took over Oghab-2, an agency formed to counter Israeli assassination plots against Iran's scientific community, in 2007. The agency's success remains unclear given the spate of Israeli-led assassinations of Iranian scientists across 2011 and 2012, halting only during the progress of US-Iran nuclear talks, just as it also remains unclear who led Oghab-2 during the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (touted as the father of Iran's nuclear programme) in 2020.
Vahidi's Dualities
Ahmad Vahidi fought for the Islamic Republic's theocratic system and its antagonism towards the United States, which it justified in relation to Washington's historic subversion of Iranian interests. However, reflecting both Vahidi's faith and trust in the system's tactical flexibilities, as well as Tehran's trust in Vahidi's loyalty and capability, he was placed at the forefront of Iran's then-secret dealings with the United States, which became known as the Iran Contra Affair of 1985-87. Vahidi helped implement the arms-for-hostages deal that later brought infamy to the Reagan administration, and was part of those who met Robert McFarlane, the then US National Security Advisor. It was Vahidi's special relationship with Hezbollah that helped Tehran persuade the group to release American hostages in return for US arms shipped to Iran via Israel - an incident that went against the geopolitical orientations of all actors involved.
More notably, despite his eventful tenure, Vahidi briefly fell out with the IRGC's senior commanders and IRGC Chief Mohsen Rezaee, when he was deemed responsible for an Iraq-backed communist (Mojahedin-e-Khalq) offensive in Kermanshah province in 1988. Former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani notes in his memoirs that it was he, in his capacity as the then Deputy Commander in Chief of the Iranian armed forces, who saved Vahidi from arrest and persuaded Rezaee to retract his charges. While other contemporary accounts of this incident are limited, Vahidi evidently retained enough goodwill in the establishment to be appointed Quds Force Commander shortly after.
More recently, as Interior Minister, Vahidi fiercely defended the regime during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, described the global pressure against Iran's modesty laws as a "colonial plot", and underplayed the regime's harsh measures against both Amini and other protestors. However, the following year, he fired his political deputy, Mohammad-Reza Gholamreza, as part of concessions to public pressure over the Raisi administration's shortcomings, which Ali Khamenei himself had acknowledged implicitly. This was even as Vahidi himself appointed members of the Guards to high governmental positions such as provincial governorships, at a time when street clamour against the regime was high.
Ultimately, Vahidi has shown an ability to mix absolute loyalty to the Islamic Republic's system with the need for tactical adjustments and pragmatism. The latter was meant to service the former. It was this characteristic that made him Deputy IRGC Commander in the aftermath of the 12-day war in 2025, appointed by then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and now IRGC Commander (as Major General) under Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
Vahidi And The Current War
Presently, Ahmad Vahidi reports to the hitherto unseen and new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. His former boss, Mohsen Rezaee, is the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and among the coterie of figures running the Islamic Republic.
Vahidi and Rezaee evidently have a long, not unblemished, history of working together, and both are the only IRGC Commanders with INTERPOL Red Notices against them. But as their historical record shows, both work to secure and consolidate the IRGC's strength, not undermine it. In this regard, Vahidi has joined a list of leaders - both those alive and recently assassinated by the US or Israel - who have charted their own paths to the top and have adopted different policy postures across time, but all of whom ultimately serve to preserve the larger system.
Consequently, it is of limited value to debate Ahmad Vahidi's elevation as a special factor in Iran's approach to the United States in 2026. The Iranian system has been reacting to Washington's unilateral measures as a composite decision-making unit, which has always been IRGC-influenced. Currently, given both the Trump administration's oscillations in its approach to Iran and the continuing Israeli/American threat to Iranian leaders, Tehran's wartime administration has naturally witnessed a greater centralisation of the Revolutionary Guards' influence and bargaining power. It is in the light of this centralisation that Vahidi's rise reflects the IRGC's need for an experienced veteran at its helm when it is both vulnerable enough to keep a new Supreme Leader out of the public view but strong enough to exercise unprecedented leverage against the United States (in the Strait of Hormuz). The IRGC's present position is arguably reflective of the dualities that Vahidi himself experienced across his career.
(Bashir Ali Abbas is a Senior Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi. Views are strictly personal.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
