Meet the biggest winner of the war with Iran

After months of on-and-off talks, Iran and the United States are set to end their war and sign an interim peace agreement on Friday June 19 in Switzerland.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi led most of the negotiations, but no Iranian politician has benefited more from the talks than Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Majles (Iran’s parliament), who was officially the head of Iran’s negotiation team. His meteoric rise comes after a controversial career — one in which Ghalibaf has drifted in and out of favor with both Iran’s leadership and people.

In 1961, Ghalibaf was born to a religious family in Torghabeh, not far from the sacred city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran. He received a master’s degree from the University of Tehran (UT) and a Ph.D. from Tarbiat-e Modarres University, both in political geography. He is an associate professor at UT and teaches the same subject there. He has also published three books. But the most important aspect of Ghalibaf’s record is his military-political work.

Ghalibaf first joined the Basij militia, a paramilitary force and one of the five main branches of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), after the 1979 Revolution. When Kurdish forces tried to take over Iran’s Kurdistan Province in the first months after the revolution, Ghalibaf took part in defeating their forces. After Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, Ghalibaf was transferred to the IRGC and fought in the southern front of the war. He was rapidly promoted, first taking the command of a brigade, and then leading the 5th Nasr Division as well as the 25th Karbala Division, two of the IRGC’s most important fighting forces during the war with Iraq.

After the war ended in 1988, Ghalibaf was commissioned as a brigadier general and appointed the commander of the Najaf Command Center in western Iran, and then deputy commander of the Basij militia. From 1994 to 1997, Ghalibaf served as commander of Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters , the operational headquarters of the IRGC that also coordinates its operations with the regular armed forces. He is a certified pilot of Airbus aircrafts, having received training in France, and from 1997 to 2000 he was promoted to commander of the IRGC air force.

When the university uprising of July 1999 began at the University of Tehran and quickly spread to other universities, Ghalibaf helped put it down. In addition, after the uprising ended, Ghalibaf wrote a letter signed by 24 other senior IRGC commanders to then-president Mohammad Khatami, warning him that if he did not end the pursuit of his reformist policies, they would be forced to take strong action. That letter established the IRGC as a powerful force to be reckoned with in Iran, which appears to have become even more powerful today.

In 2001, Ghalibaf became commander of the national police, and his forces took part in confronting renewed large-scale demonstrations by university students in Tehran in 2003 , during which he even threatened to kill the protesters. The national police under his command summoned several dozen journalists, intellectuals, and dissidents and interrogated and even imprisoned them. Among them was Siamak Pourmand, a prominent film critic who was imprisoned and then lived under house arrest until committing suicide in 2011.

Ghalibaf retired from the military in 2005 and was elected Tehran’s mayor for four terms, from 2005 to 2017. He ran multiple times in the presidential elections but failed. He also ran in the elections for the Majles in 2020 and was elected and then re-elected in 2024. He has been accused in multiple cases of corruption and nepotism, particularly when he was Tehran’s mayor, and even in the Majles.

Ghalibaf has always tried to present himself as a pragmatist, even though he has long been close to the Osoolgarayan , Iran’s traditional conservatives. For a while, he even referred to himself as a technocrat. As Tehran’s mayor, he developed and carried out several large projects to improve Tehran as a huge metropolitan area. But in 2013, after the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attacked technocrats by name, he stopped using the term.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran paved Ghalibaf’s path to the heights of Iran’s leadership. When Israel assassinated Ali Larijani, secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ghalibaf ran the SNSC unofficially until Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr , a retired IRGC brigadier general and an ultra-hardliner, was appointed to the post. Ghalibaf was then appointed as the head of Iran’s team for negotiating with the United States. The question is why, given his controversial background? The answer is multifold.

One reason is that, given Ghalibaf’s diverse military, academic, and political background, he represents a compromise between Iranian political factions for leading the negotiations. Ghalibaf was also close to Major General Qassem Soleimani (posthumously promoted to lieutenant general), Iran’s top military strategist who the…