Helicopter deaths: Two of Iran’s most influential leaders died in a helicopter crash yesterday, close to the country’s border with Azerbaijan. President Ebrahim Raisi—widely seen as second in command, and (until yesterday) the likely successor to the ailing 85-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei—has died, as has Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian. State media is blaming their deaths on a “technical failure” of the helicopter as it flew through a mountainous region.

Raisi, nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran,” was responsible for some of the regime’s most brutal crackdowns on its critics. Under his leadership, the Mahsa Amini protests for women’s rights, including an end to compulsory hijab, were suppressed. He also played key roles in suppressing the 2021–2022 demonstration over water shortages and bad economic conditions and the November 2019 protests over fuel prices, in which roughly 500 people were killed. (Though Raisi only became president in 2021, he was in charge of the judiciary starting in 2019, so some of these things were within his purview before his ascension into greater power.) Earlier in his career, Raisi was part of a small panel that decided to execute 5,000 dissidents during the Iran-Iraq war. The dissidents were not given trials.

The New York Times describes him as a “facilitator of the growing power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran’s politics and economy.” He also helped strengthen Tehran’s ties with Russia and China, and emboldened his country’s proxies elsewhere in the Middle East.