Israel’s first round of airstrikes, in what the Israeli government is describing as an extended campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, killed several top Iranian military officers and nuclear scientists.
Several others’ statuses remain unclear as of Friday, variously reportedly as killed, injured, or potentially defecting.
Targets confirmed as of Friday morning included:
Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Salami was the most important target eliminated by Israel’s attack. Iranian state media reported he was “martyred in the Israeli regime’s attack on the IRGC headquarters” in Tehran.
An Israeli security official told Fox News on Friday that Israel used its extensive knowledge of the top IRGC commanders to lure them into a meeting and “keep them there” until an airstrike wiped them out. Israel used similar tactics to destroy the leadership of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It is possible Iranian media accounts of Salami’s death are either confused or deliberately misleading, as some other reports say he was killed at his home in Tehran.
Sixty-five years old at the time of his death, Salami was one of the most powerful men in Iran. He joined the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and was appointed its commander in 2019 by “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2019.
The IRGC is the theocratically-controlled wing of the Iranian military and is also a designated terrorist organization, responsible for recruiting and arming Iranian proxy forces across the Middle East.
Salami was noted for constantly threatening attacks against the United States and Israel. He ordered Iran’s two failed missile strikes against Israel during the Gaza war, which provoked Israel to wipe out much of Iran’s air defense network, which paved the way for the swift elimination of the IRGC commander on Thursday night.
The day before Israel took him out, Salami claimed Iran’s military was “fully ready for any scenarios, situations, and circumstances.”
“The enemy thinks it can fight Iran the same way it fights defenseless Palestinians who are under an Israeli siege. We are war-tested and experienced,” he boasted.
On Friday, Khamenei decreed that Salami’s replacement would be Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, former IRGC leader and interior minister under President Ebrahim Raisi. Vahidi was the first commander of the IRGC’s foreign terrorism squad, the Quds Force. The most famous of his successors was Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was eliminated by order of President Donald Trump in January 2020 after plotting attacks on Americans in Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces. Somewhere between 65 and 68 years old according to various sources, Bagheri became the highest-ranking officer in the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2016. Before that, he was an intelligence officer in the IRGC, ultimately joining an “elite force” that carried out the most “sensitive missions.”
Bagheri was under heavy sanctions by the United States, Canada, UK, and European Union for his role in violently suppressing the Mahsa Amini uprising in 2022, and for implementing other “destabilizing” policies of Supreme Leader Khamenei. The European Union sanctioned him in 2022 for supplying drones to Russia for use against Ukraine.
Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid, head of IRGC Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters and deputy chief of staff for the armed forces.
Rashid was born in 1953 and was regarded as a heroic activist during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was among the first intelligence directors of the newly-formed IRGC. Like Salami, he was a military commander during the brutal war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.
The Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters is a joint operations center for the IRGC and the regular Iranian army. It is considered the primary engineering department of the IRGC, playing a key role in the development of Iran’s ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. According to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), Khatam-al Anbiya was “heavily involved” in building the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant, a heavily fortified underground facility.
Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of IRGC aerospace forces. According to Israeli officials, Hajizadeh was killed along with other top leaders of the IRGC air force while meeting in an underground command center to plan attacks on Israel.
“Hajizadeh publicly pledged allegiance to the idea of destroying Israel on multiple occasions in recent years and played a central role in formulating the plan to destroy Israel,” the Israeli military said.
Hajizadeh, reportedly in his early 60s, was a sniper and artillery officer during the Iran-Iraq War. He was instrumental in building Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles with acquisitions from North Korea and Libya. He also played a role in establishing the underground nuclear facility at Parchin in 2002.
In a 2020 interview, Hajizadeh said he was hand-picked by Supreme Leader Khamenei to provide Iran’s terrorist proxies across the Middle East with ballistic missiles.
Like other top Iranian military officials, Hajizadeh constantly boasted that his forces were more than a match for Israel. In 2009, he declared that “in case of any aggression, the Zionists’ F15 and F16 aircraft will be trapped by our aircraft and destroyed, and if one of their aircraft manages to escape Iran’s air defense, before it can land, the bases from which these aircraft have taken off will be struck by our destructive ground-to-ground missiles.”
None of that happened on the night Israel killed Hajizadeh with astounding speed and precision, after dismantling his vaunted air defenses and neutralizing his ballistic missiles. Several of his top officers died alongside him, including the leaders of the IRGC’s air defense and drone commands.
Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, key Iranian nuclear scientist and politician. Abbasi is a former IRGC officer who joined its research center for missiles and nuclear weapons in 1984. He was the vice president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization from 2011 to 2013.
Abbasi was the most prominent of the six Iranian nuclear scientists eliminated by Israel’s airstrikes. He has been cited as one of the most important players in concealing Iran’s illicit research from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He was sanctioned by the United Nations in 2007 for participating in Iran’s illegal development of nuclear weapons.
Abbasi became head of the Atomic Energy Organization a few months after he narrowly survived an assassination attempt on the streets of Tehran. His appointment was seen as a gesture of symbolic defiance by the regime toward the U.S. and Israel, both of whom Iran blamed for trying to kill him with a bomb planted on the door of his car. By all accounts, Abbasi was not very good at his job – he was notoriously poor at dealing with the media – so he was soon replaced.
A hardline Islamist, Abbasi was elected to the Iranian parliament in 2020 and held his seat until 2024. He has said he would be happy to build a nuclear bomb if the Ayatollah commanded it and believed it was impossible for Iran’s nuclear program to be neutralized by military action or assassination, including his own death.
Mohamed Mehdi Tehranchi, physicist and president of Islamic Azad University. Tehranchi was the other big name among the six nuclear scientists killed on Thursday. Islamic Azad University is Iran’s largest institution of higher learning. Tehranchi was also a professor of laser and plasma research at another school, Shahid Beheshti University.
Tehranchi supervised Iran’s first effort to build a nuclear weapon in 2004, the so-called “Amad Plan.”
He was sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2020, after President Trump pulled out of former president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran due to the regime’s “unacceptable nuclear escalations.”
Notably, not even the infamously Iran-friendly Obama administration was willing to lift the sanctions against Shahid Beheshti University, where Tehranchi’s work on lasers was seen as important to Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
Ali Shamkhani, former IRGC commander and adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei. Shamkhani was either killed or critically injured in Thursday night’s attack, according to various Iranian sources. His residence atop an apartment building in Tehran was apparently destroyed by an Israeli missile.
Shamkhani was one of the lead negotiators involved in indirect talks with the United States. In May, he floated a suggestion that Iran might be willing to sign a deal that eliminated its stockpiles of near-weapons-grade uranium in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions. Iranian officials said on Friday that if he is dead, nuclear diplomacy died with him.
Shamkhani was among Iran’s top strategists, and has long been the top-ranking ethnic Arab in the Islamic Republic.
Esmail Qaani, head of the IRGC Quds Force, successor to the late Qassem Soleimani. Qaani’s fate was one of the most intriguing question marks hanging over the first stage of the Israeli operation as of Friday morning. He was the deputy commander of the Quds Force until Soleimani was eliminated, after which he was named the new chief of the terrorist unit by Ayatollah Khamenei.
Qaani would seem to have solid credentials for the job, having served in the Iran-Iraq War and developed a close personal friendship with Soleimani. He was also on good personal terms with Khamenei.
Nevertheless, rumors have persisted over the past few years that he was actually an asset for Israeli intelligence who provided information crucial to eliminating the leaders of Hamas and Hezobollah. On Friday, there were unconfirmed reports he was exfiltrated to Israel after the airstrikes. Other rumors said Qaani was killed in the strikes. His true fate was not a matter of public knowledge as of early Friday afternoon.
Jesus Christ is King
