Iranian Shia cleric and founder of Hezbollah dies of Covid-19

June 8. A conservative force within Iranian and regional politics, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour died of the coronavirus aged 74. Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, a Shia cleric who as Iran’s ambassador to Syria helped found the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and lost his right hand to a book bombing, has died of the coronavirus. Mohtashamipour died at a hospital in northern Tehran after contracting the virus, the state-run IRNA news agency reported on Monday. The cleric, who wore a black turban that identified him in Shia tradition as a direct descendant of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, had been living in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Iraq, over the last 10 years after the disputed election in Iran. A close ally of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mohtashamipour in the 1970s formed alliances with Muslim militant groups across the Mideast. After the Islamic Revolution, he helped found the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Iran and as ambassador to Syria brought the force into the region to help form Hezbollah. In his later years, he slowly joined the cause of reformists in Iran, hoping to change the Islamic Republic’s theocracy from the inside. He backed the opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi in Iran’s Green Movement protests that followed the disputed 2009 re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “If the whole people become aware, avoid violent measures and continue their civil confrontation with that, they will win,” Mohtashamipour said at the time, though Ahmadinejad ultimately would remain in office. “No power can stand up to people’s will.”