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After Ali Larijani, what comes next?

DURING the Al Quds Day rally in Tehran on Friday, as bombs fell around them, a number of top Iranian leaders took to the streets. Shortly thereafter, CNN broadcast a Pentagon briefing by Pete Hegseth, who boasted that the US-Israeli onslaught had forced Iran’s leadership to cower underground, ‘like rats’. Any impact these words could have, however, evaporated when the broadcaster used a picture-in-picture overlay and showed visuals of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and other senior officials mingling with people on the streets of Iran’s capital. Among the crowd, one man stood out from the rest. Clad in a zipped-up black jacket, he mingled freely with participants of the rally, exchanged greetings with senior citizens, and walked around with general nonchalance. This was Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and a close confidant of Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The political and military veteran wa...
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Ali Larijani — Iran’s ultimate backroom powerbroker

Veteran Iranian politician Ali Larijani was one of the most powerful figures in the Islamic republic, an architect of its security policy, and a close adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei until the supreme leader’s assassination in an airstrike last month. Larijani, 67, was assassinated by a US-Israeli air attack as he was visiting his daughter in the eastern outskirts of a Tehran suburb, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said on Tuesday. The scion of a leading clerical family with brothers who ​rose to high positions after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Larijani was seen as canny and pragmatic but always fiercely determined to uphold Iran’s theocratic system of government. A Revolutionary Guard Corps commander during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, he became head of Iran’s ‌national broadcaster before stints running the Supreme National Security Council either side of his membership of parliament, where he was speaker for 12 years. His role as the ultimate insider in Ali Khamenei...
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Trump blasts ‘foolish’ Nato on Iran, says US needs no help after allies rebuff call for help on Hormuz

US President Donald Trump lashed out Tuesday at “foolish” Nato over Iran, saying the United States needs no help after allies rebuffed his calls to join efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said most US allies had rejected his push to escort ships through the crucial waterway, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying his country would “never” do so until the situation was calmer. “I think Nato is making a very foolish mistake,” Trump told reporters as he hosted Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin in the Oval Office. “I’ve long said that I wonder whether or not Nato would ever be there for us. So this was a great test.” But Trump insisted that Washington was ready to go it alone against Iran, saying that even Nato allies had agreed that Tehran needed to be confronted over its nuclear programme. “We don’t need too much help. We don’t need any help,” Trump said. Minutes before the meeting, Trump made a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform saying US forces “no longe...
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Minab school strike violated humanitarian law: Amnesty

ISLAMABAD: An investigation by Amnesty International into an airstrike on an Iranian school – which claimed the lives of about 168 people, mostly children – has blamed the US for the deliberate, deadly attack and urged the authorities to ensure a transparent and thorough investigation to ensure accountability. In an in-depth report, the rights watchdog revealed that the US violated international humanitarian law by failing to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm and sought accountability for the perpetrators. It said the school building was directly struck, alongside 12 other structures in an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) compound, with guided weapons, adding that this showed that US forces did not take precautions to avoid civilian harm. “The fact that the school building was directly targeted and was previously part of the IRGC compound raises concerns that US forces may have relied on outdated intelligence and failed in their obligation t...
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Rebuttal on purchase of luxury vehicle for Yousaf Raza Gilani from Senate budget leaves questions unanswered

A rebuttal by the Senate Secretariat on reports of the purchase of a luxury vehicle for Senate Chairperson Yousaf Raza Gilani further confused the matter on Monday, essentially confirming the purchase and reiterating the details reported in this connection. The rebuttal was issued after it was reported that a vehicle worth Rs90 million was bought for Gilani from the Senate’s budget. The reports also quoted Gilani as explaining that the car was ordered in May last year, “using savings from the Senate’s budget of the previous year”. These details were also confirmed in the Senate’s rebuttal, which, however, did not mention the cost of the car. The rebuttal said: “The attention of the Senate Secretariat has been drawn to certain media reports regarding the purchase of a vehicle (Land Cruiser) for the honourable Senate chairman.” “These reports are misleading, factually incorrect, and appear to be based on incomplete information and mala fide intentions,” it said, without specifying w...
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‘When you burn our hearts, you do not stop us’: Iranian families weep as war dead are buried in Tehran cemetery

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As gravediggers prepared new burial plots for those killed in the US-Israeli attack on Iran , Marzia Razaei wept for her son Arfan Shamei, who died in a blast at a military training camp days before he was due home on leave. The war that began on February 28 with a blitz of air strikes on Tehran and other cities has killed more than 1,300 Iranians so far, according to Iranian officials, and plunged the Middle East into crisis. Marzia Rezaei reacts while standing near the grave of her son, Erfan, who was killed in strikes, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, in Tehran, Iran, March 16, 2026. — Reuters Tears streamed down Razaei’s face and she stared vacantly, hugging a large portrait of Shamei, 23, her voice breaking with grief as she recalled her last conversation with him when they discussed his coming trip back home to his family. “I hadn’t seen him for two months,” she said, adding that his last day before heading home was meant to have been...
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Situationer: PPP’s gubernatorial gambit ‘pays off’

IN sacking Kamran Tessori as Sindh governor, it is not just that the ruling PML-N has bowed to pressure from its coalition partner, the PPP. Rather, it appears that Mr Tessori had outlived his usefulness to those who brought him into office, as his “sacrifice” is being viewed as part of a larger gambit aimed at reshaping the Constitution and the resource distribution fram­ework between the provinces and the federation, rather than merely antagonising the MQM-Pakistan. For context, the Muttahida-nominated Mr Tessori was rem­oved from his office last week, and the PML-N replaced him with its senior leader, Nehal Hashmi, who took oath as governor on Friday. Mr Tessori was not a senior member of the MQM-P when on the advice of the Shehbaz Sharif-led Pakistan Democratic Move­ment (PDM) government in October 2022, then-president Arif Alvi app­ointed him the governor of Sindh. Insiders say Kamran Tessori was already on ‘borrowed time’, as PML-N had informed MQM-P of its decision to re...
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