When Qassem Soleimani died in a US air strike near Baghdad airport in January 2020, Iran needed a new head for the Quds Force within a day. The man it named was barely known outside the Revolutionary Guard. Esmail Ghaani, 62, had spent decades in the organisation without becoming a public face, and the Associated Press wrote that he had “stepped out of the shadows”.
From Mashhad to the Guard
Ghaani was born on 8 August 1957 in Mashhad, in north-eastern Iran, and grew up in the last decade of the monarchy. He entered the Guard a year on from the revolution. Like Soleimani, his first deployment was against the Kurdish uprising that followed the shah’s fall. Then Iraq invaded, and the eight-year war began, a conflict that, by the AP’s account, killed 1 million people.
He came out of it and became part of the Quds Force soon after its founding. He worked beside Soleimani and also led counterintelligence efforts in the Guard. Western analysts believe Soleimani concentrated on the countries to Iran’s west, while Ghaani’s remit lay to the east, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iranian state media has said little about his time in the Guard. “We are children of war,” he once said of their bond, according to IRNA. “We are comrades on the battlefield and we have become friends in battle.”
Sanctions and a false name
The US Treasury sanctioned him in 2012, describing him as holding authority over “financial disbursements” to proxies tied to the Quds Force. Those sanctions linked him to a weapons shipment intercepted at Lagos in 2010. Nigerian authorities opened 13 shipping containers labelled as glass wool and stone pallets and found 107 mm Katyusha rockets and rifle rounds.
A different episode surfaced days after his appointment. Tahir Zaheer, governor of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, said Ghaani had travelled there in 2018 with eight other Iranians in a small plane, introducing himself as Iran’s deputy ambassador to Kabul under the surname Ismaili. Afghanistan’s foreign ministry said the trip was under investigation, and added plainly that he had never been a diplomat.
The job he inherited
The Quds Force sits inside the 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard, which answers only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It works with allied groups across the region, including militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. For families living where those groups operate, the identity of the man in charge matters.
Khamenei called Ghaani “one of the most prominent commanders” and said the Quds Force “will be unchanged from the time of his predecessor”, according to IRNA.
Sources
- Esmail Ghaani replaces Qassem Soleimani as leader of Iran's Quds Force (CBC News / Associated Press)
- Soleimani successor used false identity to visit Afghanistan in 2018 – Bamiyan governor (Arab News)
