TEHRAN: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami, who was killed in an Israeli air strike on Tehran Friday, was a veteran officer close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei known for his tirades against Israel and its US ally.
“If you make the slightest mistake, we will open the gates of hell for you,“ the white-beared general warned Tehran’s arch foes during a tour of an underground missile base in January.
Born in 1960 in central Iran, Salami joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1980 at the start of the devastating eight-year war launched by then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
He spent most of his career in the Guards, a parallel military set up after the 1979 overthrow of the Western-backed shah to defend the goals of the Islamic revolution.
The force is now 125,000-strong strong, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, although Iran has never released any official figure.
Salami rose through the ranks to become head of the Guards’ aerospace division, and was placed on Washington’s sanctions blacklist.
He served as the corps’ deputy commander for nine years before being promoted to the top job in 2019 as part of a major reshuffle.
Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had made support for the Palestinian cause a centrepiece of Tehran’s foreign policy and Salami repeatedly alluded to calls for Israel to be wiped from the map.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should “learn to swim in the Mediterranean Sea” in readiness to flee, he said in a 2018 speech.
The Revolutionary Guards played a central role in Iran’s forward foreign policy in the Arab world, which saw Tehran-backed militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah lead Gaza and Lebanon into war with Israel.
The twin conflicts were accompanied by the first-ever direct exchanges of fire between Iran and Israel last year and were to lead to the much bigger wave of Israeli strikes on Iran on Friday, one of which killed Salami.
