Raisi's successor is unlikely to end Iran's western shadow war

Even before Tehran had formally announced the death of President Ebrahim Raisi, conspiracy theories as to whether foul play was to blame began coming in rapidly. Was Israel’s Mossad, the go-to organisation Iran likes to blame for almost any catastrophe that befalls the Islamic Republic, behind the helicopter crash? Was it the CIA, the same organisation which swept the Shah to power in a coup d’état in 1953? Or was it one of many internal enemies Raisi had managed to accumulate after his years in power?

Raisi, after all, had no shortage of enemies both within and outside the regime. He was responsible for the mass executions of an estimated 30,000 thousands of political prisoners – or terrorists as Iran likes to call them – in 1988. More recently, he was behind the more than 500 civilians who were rounded-up, tortured and executed after protesting over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, who had been arrested by morality police three days earlier for allegedly violating Iran’s mandatory Islamic dress code.