‘Technical Failure’ Caused Helicopter Crash That Killed Iran’s President, State News Agency Reports

The Iranian authorities have sought to project a sense of order and control. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there would be “no disruption” to the government’s work, and on Monday he said that the first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, would assume the role of acting president and must organize elections for a new president within 50 days.

A public funeral procession for the president and foreign minister will be held in the city of Tabriz on Tuesday morning, and the bodies will then be taken to Tehran for an official funeral on Wednesday, said the interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi. Mr. Raisi’s body will then be taken to his hometown of Mashhad for another funeral service on Thursday. He will be buried in one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, the Imam Reza shrine, Iran’s state media reported.

The death of Mr. Raisi, a conservative who crushed dissent and had been viewed as a possible successor to Mr. Khamenei, occurred weeks after Tehran came close to open conflict with Israel and the United States. A long shadow war with Israel burst into the open in an exchange of direct strikes last month. And looming over everything is the question of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has produced nuclear fuel enriched to a level just short of what would be needed to produce several bombs.

Here’s what else to know:

• Mr. Raisi, a hard-line religious cleric who came of age during the country’s Islamic Revolution, was the second most powerful individual in Iran’s political structure after Mr. Khamenei. His death opens a new chapter of instability, just as the increasingly unpopular Islamic Republic is engaged in selecting its next supreme leader, and it might pave the way for Mr. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba to eventually assume that role.

• Following his ascent to the presidency in 2021, Mr. Raisi consolidated power and marginalized reformists. He continued to expand Iran’s regional influence, backing proxies across the Middle East that have conducted strikes against Israel and the United States, and oversaw a deadly crackdown on domestic protesters, many of them women and young people.

• The clandestine war with Israel burst into the open after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, setting off the war in Gaza and a cascade of strikes and counterstrikes across the region. The hostilities became even more pronounced after Israel conducted airstrikes on a building in the Iranian Embassy complex in Syria in April. Iran retaliated with its first direct attack on Israel after decades of enmity, launching more than 300 drones and missiles toward the country, almost all of which were shot down.

• The authorities in Iran also face domestic anger, with many residents calling for an end to clerical rule. Corruption and international sanctions have ravaged the economy. In the last two years, the country has seen a domestic uprising, the Iranian currency plunging to a record low, water shortages intensified by climate change and the deadliest terrorist attack since the 1979 founding of the Islamic Republic.

Mr. Khatami, who boycotted parliamentary elections in March to show discontent for the conservatives’ unilateral rule, called Mr. Raisi a “respected and hardworking civil servant,” apparently putting aside years of animosity and targeted attacks on him and his reformist party.

Iran announced on Monday that it would hold presidential elections on June 28. Analysts in Iran said that although the stability and survival of the Islamic Republic’s rule was not at risk, many were apprehensive about who would be the next president and the makeup of the next government.

They said there were already discussions among analysts and politicians that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, may encourage and allow for a more pragmatic and centrist president to form a new, less ideological government with the aim of defusing both domestic and international tensions.

“Naturally there will be political tensions and anxieties when a president is killed, and now we have no president in the country amid a long list of challenges,” said Nasser Imani, a conservative political analyst in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Everyone is wondering who will take over and what policies will be prioritized, but the system desperately needs to inject some new blood into the government and signal new policies both at home and abroad.”

Two of the three main branches of Iran’s government — the presidency and the parliament — are now without leaders. Runoff parliamentary elections were held last week and a new parliament speaker has not been decided. The death of the foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, also disrupts Iran’s recent flurry of diplomacy with regional Arab countries to forge closer ties, manage the wider conflict with Israel and conduct indirect talks with the United States.

Sasan Karimi, an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Tehran, said in a telephone interview that Iran was facing three key issues politically: a new presidential election and cabinet; a new parliament starting soon with very little public support; and the question of who will succeed Mr. Khamenei, who is 85 and in fragile health.

Mr. Raisi was considered one of the front-runners to be Mr. Khamenei’s successor, and he was also an elected member of the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that chooses the supreme leader of Iran.

Hatef Salehi, who held a senior management position at Tehran’s municipality but was fired recently because he criticized Mr. Raisi’s policies, said in a telephone interview from Tehran that he was nonetheless “very anxious” about Iran’s future and sad about the helicopter crash.

“I’m surprised to find myself so upset, but I think it’s mostly because I’m anxious about what may happen in this period of transition,” Mr. Salehi said. “Our sense of stability has been shaken even if we didn’t like Raisi and his policies.”

For the average Iranian, Mr. Raisi remained as polarizing in death as in life. His supporters holding public mourning rituals in Tehran, his hometown of Mashhad and other cities, while his critics, many of them victims of Mr. Raisi’s brutal crackdowns and oppressive policies, celebrated.

Dr. Mohsen Asadi-Lari, a former senior official with the Ministry of Health, posted a message on Instagram that read: “Sometimes you have to wait for God to take revenge for you.”

He was referring to the failed attempts to seek justice through the judiciary for the deaths of his two children, Mohammad Hossein and Zeinab, who were killed when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukrainian Arlines passenger plane with two missiles in January 2020, killing 176 people on board. Mr. Raisi was the head of the judiciary at the time.

May 20, 2024, 4:46 p.m. ET

May 20, 2024, 4:46 p.m. ET

Miller added that the Biden administration’s “fundamental approach to Iran has not changed and will not change,” and specifically noted that Americans would stand with Iranians pressing for “an open, free society and democratic participation.”

“I was very happy and I was following the jokes online and waiting for it to be announced so that we could go out” to celebrate, said Safa, 55, a doctor in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Mr. Raisi’s hometown. She, like other Iranians interviewed on Monday, asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of government retribution.

Some Iranians mourned Mr. Raisi on Monday, including people in Mashhad who held an overnight vigil for the president there and wailed when they learned of his death. State media showed images of other vigils in Tehran, the capital, and across the country.

After the authorities announced the president’s death on Monday, another image circulated online: a helicopter being strangled and brought down by ropes of braided hair, a young woman with her head uncovered standing unbowed in the foreground. It was a triumphant reference to the “woman, life, freedom” protest movement that convulsed Iran for months starting in September 2022, which began as a demonstration against a morality law requiring women to dress modestly and wear headscarves.

Mr. Raisi’s government harshly suppressed the protests with arrests and violence. Online, the daughters of an antigovernment protester whom rights groups said was shot to death during the demonstrations posted a video of themselves toasting the president’s death on Monday with what appeared to be alcoholic drinks, which are also banned in Iran.

When Safa woke up to the news, however, she burst into tears, though not exactly of grief. She could not believe she was cheering the death of a man and indifferent to the deaths of even the flight crew.

“During these 45 years, they made us monsters,” she said, referring to Iran’s autocratic regime, which came to power in a bloody 1979 revolution.

“I haven’t been able to laugh since morning, and my heart aches for Iran and Iranians,” she added. “All this humor is a bitter expression of the pain of a nation. Otherwise, how can you be happy when people are burned and torn to pieces?”

For many Iranians who grew disenchanted with the country’s clerical rulers, Mr. Raisi embodied some of the darkest moments of the regime. They said his past as a prosecutor who helped order the executions of hundreds of political prisoners in the 1980s should have disqualified him from the presidency. His death, for them, was an escape from the justice he deserved to face.

Parisa, 57, a housewife from Lahijan, in northwestern Iran, said she felt relief at first when she heard the news.

“But after they were found, I thought this easy death wasn’t enough for them,” she said. “They should have been tried in court and forced to howl like dogs and been given long and painful punishments.”

All around Iran, conspiracy theories were flying. Some thought foreign powers might be to blame; others pinned it on internal machinations. But most agreed that it would have limited effect on what many Iranians care about most: overturning the system.

Kaveh, 40, an engineer from Mashhad, said he hated the regime but had shrugged at the president’s death. Because Mr. Raisi was not the final decision-maker in Iran and clerical rule remained in place, he said, his death would change little.

“One member of a mafia was killed,” he said. “That’s it.”

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May 20, 2024, 3:18 p.m. ET

“I know the Iranians are investigating or will investigate, and so we’ll see what the outcome is, once their investigation is complete,” the defense secretary added.

A helicopter carrying senior Ukrainian officials including the minister for internal affairs, Denys Monastyrsky, crashed in January 2023 in a suburb of the capital, Kyiv, killing more than a dozen people including other pivotal figures in the wartime leadership.

Mr. Monastyrsky was a political ally of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the crash, which happened near an elementary school, is believed to have been an accident.

Last month, the chief of Kenya’s military, Gen. Francis Omondi Ogolla, died when a military helicopter in which he was traveling crashed in the west of the country. Other officials were also killed.

It was not the first such death involving a prominent Kenyan. In 2012, George Saitoti — whose posts included finance minister, education minister, acting foreign minister and vice president — died when the police helicopter he was riding in plunged into a forest west of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

In 2005, a helicopter carrying John Garang, who for decades had led the country’s rebellion against the Sudanese government, died in a helicopter crash in northern Uganda. He had been flying to southern Sudan.

Mr. Garang had been installed as vice president of Sudan just weeks before, having played a pivotal role in a peace agreement that ended that country’s civil war. His swearing-in drew in excess of a million people to the streets of Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

Mr. Garang had led a rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, that had fought since 1983 to topple the Sudanese government. South Sudan eventually became a nation in 2011.

Several other prominent people have also died in helicopter crashes. These include Thai billionaire Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, owner of the English Premier League soccer club Leicester City, who was killed in 2018 in a crash outside the stadium, and Aleksandr I. Lebed, a Soviet paratroop commander who later played a crucial supporting role in the birth of Russian democracy, who died in southern Siberia in 2002.

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May 20, 2024, 2:08 p.m. ET

Kirby added that the Iranian president “was responsible for atrocious human rights in his own country” and had “a lot of blood on his hands.” But, he said, “We certainly regret in general the loss of life and offered official condolences as appropriate.”

May 20, 2024, 1:51 p.m. ET

May 20, 2024, 1:51 p.m. ET

Hossein Amir Abdollahian, the foreign minister, will be buried in Tehran. But Ebrahim Raisi, the president, will be taken to his hometown of Mashhad for another funeral service on Thursday. He will be buried in one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, the Imam Reza shrine.

That speculation has grown with the death of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who many analysts said was being groomed to replace the supreme leader, who is 85. Mr. Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash on Sunday will not only trigger new presidential elections. It could also shift the dynamics around the selection of Ayatollah Khamenei’s replacement.

“When people started talking about Mojtaba as a potential successor in 2009, I considered it a cheap rumor,” said Arash Azizi, a lecturer at Clemson University who focuses on Iran. “But it’s not that anymore. It’s very clear now that he is a remarkable figure. And he’s remarkable because he’s been almost entirely invisible in the public eye.”

Yet a growing number within Iran’s political establishment have begun to publicly endorse him, added Mr. Azizi.

Mr. Khamenei, 55, is the second son of the ayatollah’s six children. A conservative hard-liner, he grew up in the clerical and political elite of the Islamic Republic, established in 1979, and later fostered ties within the powerful Revolutionary Guards. Today, he is believed to play a critical role in running his father’s office.

But many Iran experts dismiss the idea that the ayatollah’s own son could replace him as a danger to the system.

Since the 1979 revolution deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a small group of Shiite clerics that run Iran have held far more power than elected officials. But a foundational principle of the Islamic Republic was that it ended hereditary rule.

“If the supreme leader turns into a hereditary system, what does that mean? It means the system is dead,” said Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst and editor of Amwaj, an independent online media outlet that focuses on Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.

Mojtaba Khamenei teaches at Iran’s largest seminary, in Qom, but other religious leaders have disputed his credentials. He has not achieved a high rank within the Shiite clerical hierarchy, something long seen as necessary for taking on the role of supreme leader.

Where he seems adept, however, is in political maneuvering.

A veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Khamenei became a friend of his fellow soldier Hossein Taeb, who later became leader of the Revolutionary Guards’ paramilitary unit, the Basij, and later led its intelligence forces for many years. Mr. Khamenei is believed to have other high-level links to Iran’s security apparatus as well, said Mr. Azizi.

Mr. Khamenei was accused by Iranian reformists of playing a significant role in the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-line populist, who unexpectedly beat the leading candidates at the time.

In 2009, after Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election against the reformist leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, antigovernment protests swept the country. Responding to Mr. Khamenei’s suspected role in the election, as well as rumors of his succession, some opposition activists chanted, “Mojtaba, may you die and not become supreme leader.”

Then, in 2022, in another wave of antgovernment protests, Mr. Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011, called on Ayatollah Khamenei to dispel the rumors about his son succeeding him. The ayatollah did not respond then.

But earlier this year, he did, as the issue of succession becomes far more pressing.

The cleric Mahmoud Mohammadi Araghi, a member of the Assembly of Experts that selects the supreme leader, told the state-affiliated news agency ILNA that Ayatollah Khamenei was vehemently opposed to his son being considered.

The Assembly of Experts must unanimously select the supreme leader. Until then, they could choose a three- or five-member leadership council to run the country.

Ultimately, the fate of any potential successor lies within an opaque system that critics say has only become less transparent in recent years.

“The reality is that nobody knows,” said Mr. Shabani. “And that is crazy. There is zero transparency on a process that affects millions of Iranians.”

On Monday, Iran’s former foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said that by imposing sanctions on the country’s aviation industry, the United States was responsible for the crash. His comments were carried by the official Iranian news agency, IRNA.

Sanam Vakil, a Middle East expert at Chatham House, a research group based in London, said that Iran’s aviation sector has long suffered under sanctions.

“Iran has seen a lot of airline incidents, not just helicopter but airplane crashes, and I think this is definitely tied to sanctions,” she said.

Ms. Vakil said that while she did not have details of the circumstances surrounding Sunday’s fatal crash, it was telling that two of the country’s top leaders — Mr. Raisi and the foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian — were traveling in an aging helicopter. Iranian state media showed images of the crashed helicopter, a Bell 212, a model that was originally developed for the Canadian military in the 1960s, according to the Reuters news agency.

Iran has historically had a significant airline sector — its national carrier is Iran Air — that serves its population of 88 million people with domestic and international routes. In 1995, the United States under President Bill Clinton put in place sanctions that prevented Iran from updating its commercial airline fleet. They forced it to use substandard Russian planes and to patch up older jets far past their normal years of service, sometimes drawing on spare parts bought on the black market.

The 2015 nuclear agreement that Iran reached with world powers including the United States saw some of those sanctions lifted, but they were largely reinstated three years later when President Donald J. Trump pulled out of the deal. The Trump administration also canceled Boeing’s licenses to sell aircraft to Iran, nullifying a $16.6 billion deal that the aviation giant reached with Tehran in 2016 for the sale of 80 airplanes.

The reintroduction of the restrictions, which Iran’s then-president, Hassan Rouhani, described as economic war, further threatened the country’s oil, shipping and banking industries as well as its currency.

The Iranian authorities have attempted to build up domestic production and supplies of aircraft parts in line with a broader policy of developing a resistance economy as a bulwark against sanctions. But the high-tech spare parts important in aviation can be difficult to fabricate domestically, according to experts.

More broadly, the economic effects of the sanctions have fueled broader grievances and protests against the ruling establishment, including over a lack of political and social freedoms, corruption and economic mismanagement.

Video

After scouring a mountainous area of dense forest, rescuers found the remains of the aircraft, which had the president and foreign minister on board.CreditCredit…Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

But given the Islamic Republic is facing internal protests, a weak economy, endemic corruption and tensions with Israel, analysts expect little change in Iran’s foreign or domestic policies. Ayatollah Khamenei has set the direction for the country, and any new president will not alter it much.

The system is “already on a trajectory to make sure that the successor of the supreme leader is completely in line with his vision for the future of the system,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director at the International Crisis Group.

He described “a pretty hard-line vision” in which crucial areas of foreign policy, like support for regional proxy militias and developing components for a nuclear weapon, are not going to change.

Whoever is chosen as the next president, Mr. Vaez said, “has to be someone who falls in line with that vision, a subservient figurehead.”

Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations, also sees continuity on major foreign policy issues, including regional affairs and the nuclear program. “These files have been under the control of Iran’s supreme leader and the I.R.G.C.,” she said, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, “with Raisi having little influence during his tenure as president.”

“Raisi was certainly useful to some I.R.G.C. factions,” Ms. Geranmayeh said. Unlike his predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, Mr. Raisi, a more conservative loyalist, “did not challenge the I.R.G.C. either on domestic or foreign policy issues,” she said.

But criticism of Mr. Raisi’s performance as president had already raised questions about whether he was the best candidate to succeed Ayatollah Khamenei, she said.

Mr. Raisi’s main rival was considered to be Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, 55, whose candidacy has been harmed by the aura of a monarchical succession.

With previous supreme leaders arguing that hereditary rule under the shah was illegitimate, “they would be hard-pressed to sell hereditary leadership to the Iranian people now,” said Shay Khatiri, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, a research institution focused on superpower competition.

Mr. Raisi’s death may give Mojtaba Khamenei an easier path to succeed his father. But the internal workings of Iran’s religious and domestic politics are deliberately mysterious, and the decision in the end will be made by a council of senior clerics known as the Assembly of Experts. Though Mojtaba Khamenei, himself a cleric, is considered to be a favorite of the clergy, the assembly may yet decide to pick one of their own or have more of a collective leadership.

His father, the supreme leader, had worked hard “to reduce the unpredictability within the system by grooming President Raisi to potentially be his successor, and now all of those plans are out of the window and they’re back to the drawing board,” Mr. Vaez said. “They have to organize an internal election” for the next supreme leader inside the system “at a time that the regime is facing a severe crisis of legitimacy at home.”

As for the public election for the next president, supposed to take place within 50 days, there are worries about public indifference.

The regime has become increasingly divorced from the population, Mr. Vaez and others said, by cracking down on public dissent, including on women protesting the Islamic dress code and a lack of freedoms.

By disqualifying “any candidate who is even a loyal critic of the system,” elections have become a farce, Mr. Vaez said. “The Islamic Republic has really focused on ideological conformity at the top rather than legitimacy from below.”

That has produced enormous political apathy, with fewer than 10 percent of voters in Tehran turning out for parliamentary runoff elections just 10 days ago. “All the government cares about now is a smooth transition to the next supreme leader,” Mr. Vaez said.

A new administration, Ms. Geranmayeh said, “will inherit a broken economy and an even more broken social contract with a population that has been deeply frustrated with the Islamic Republic.”

Externally, the challenges are steep as well. Iran and Israel attacked each other directly in April, even as Israel is already fighting Iran’s military proxies — Hamas in Gaza and, less vividly, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran also sponsors the Houthis in Yemen, who have attacked shipping in the Red Sea.

Iran has worked to avoid a larger war between Hezbollah and Israel, and a direct conflict with Israel is also something the Islamic Republic can ill afford.

It has been holding intermittent talks with the United States on de-escalating the regional conflict and on the future of its nuclear program. The death of Mr. Raisi threatens to complicate those talks, too.

“While there will be no love lost in D.C. for Raisi, instability in Iran would come at a bad time,” said Trita Parsi, an Iran expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, making “escalation prevention all the more difficult.”

Since the collapse of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in 2018, when Donald J. Trump, then the president, pulled out of the arrangement, Iran has moved to enrich uranium very close to bomb grade, causing tensions, too, with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran has turned openly toward closer alignment with American rivals, especially Russia and China, which once supported the international effort to constrain Iran’s nuclear program but do so no longer.

Both countries have been buying Iran’s oil, despite international sanctions, helping to keep the Iranian economy barely afloat. Iran has been a crucial supporter of Russia’s war against Ukraine, selling it drones of all kinds as well as ballistic missiles in return for help with missile design, analysts say.

Increasingly, some Iranian officials speak of the program as a nuclear deterrent, even as the government insists that Iran’s program is purely civilian, and Ayatollah Khamenei has denied that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps is considered increasingly powerful in both nuclear and regional affairs, taking advantage of Ayatollah Khamenei’s weakened health and the regime’s fear of internal instability. The larger question is whether the Revolutionary Guards, already a major economic player domestically, will become more openly powerful politically as well.

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Video filmed by a Turkish broadcaster appears to show the helicopter crash site where Iran’s president and foreign minister were killed.CreditCredit…Ahaber, via Reuters

In Israel, Mr. Raisi was perceived as a weak figurehead who had little influence on Iran’s foreign policy, in particular its backing for Israel’s enemies across the Middle East. Israeli experts said that his replacement was expected to maintain Iran’s stance toward Israel, and that the real power in Tehran lay with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

“From Israel’s point of view, I don’t see any achievement in his being replaced by some other radical conservative Iranian,” said Sima Shine, a former senior official in the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, where she focused on Iran. “The president is not the most important person in Iran,” said Ms. Shine, now an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, a research group in Tel Aviv.

With or without Mr. Raisi, Israel still sees Iran as an existential threat, both because of its efforts to build a nuclear program as well as its support for groups that are hostile to Israel, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

To restrain Iranian influence, Israel has assassinated Iranian officials and targeted its nuclear and military facilities. In 2020, Israeli agents killed Iran’s top nuclear scientist using a remote-controlled gun. Earlier this year, an Israeli strike in Syria killed three senior Iranian military commanders, prompting Iran to respond with a huge barrage of ballistic and cruise missiles.

But Israel was unlikely to have killed Mr. Raisi, because he, unlike experienced scientists and generals, is ultimately so replaceable, according to Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli professor who teaches Iranian studies at Reichman University in Israel.

The killing of a nuclear scientist might slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear program, but any Iranian president is likely to maintain the same antagonism toward Israel, he said.

“His absence or presence” would not have much of an impact either way, Professor Javedanfar said. “The same cannot be said of a nuclear scientist, working on a program that could produce a nuclear bomb to threaten Israel.”

He called Mr. Raisi “a foot soldier of the supreme leader,” and added: “He was a loyal servant, with little influence within the regime.”

That Mr. Raisi perished in a helicopter crash on his way back from a rare meeting with the president of Azerbaijan, Iran’s neighbor to the north, highlights the fragile geopolitical dynamics in Caucasus region that could be unsettled by his death.

Sunday’s meeting was the high point of an effort by both countries to patch up their relationship, which had been strained by an attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran last year and by Azerbaijan’s increasingly close ties to Israel, Iran’s archenemy.

Those efforts could be dealt a setback by Mr. Raisi’s death, in part because Azerbaijan’s partnership with Israel might give rise to conspiracy theories blaming it, Zaur Shiriyev, an independent scholar based in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, said.

In Iran, “there will likely be attempts to blame external enemies,” Mr. Shiriyev said. “Such allegations could create new tensions in Baku-Tehran ties, which Baku would definitely like to avoid.”

Iranian state news media reported on Monday that the cause of the helicopter crash was a “technical failure.”

Israel is a key international partner for Azerbaijan, a predominantly Muslim, energy-rich former Soviet republic in the Caucasus Mountains. When Azerbaijan fought a 44-day war against its neighbor Armenia in 2020 to recapture a swath of territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh, Israel provided drones so crucial in the victory that Israeli flags were waved in the streets of Baku.

Amid Israel’s war in Gaza, Mr. Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s authoritarian leader, has sought to avoid taking sides. Azerbaijan’s state oil company, Socar, continues to export to Israel, drawing public protests in Turkey, Azerbaijan’s most important ally.

Azerbaijan’s relationship with Iran has been tense for years. Azerbaijan’s military victory over Armenia in 2020, and its closer ties to both Turkey and Israel, redrew the geopolitical map of the Caucasus, a volatile region where the interests of Russia, Turkey and Iran have long come into conflict. And early last year, Azerbaijan closed its embassy in Tehran after the deadly attack that Mr. Aliyev called a terrorist act.

But both sides have since tried to repair the relationship, and Azerbaijani officials have said they would not allow Israel to use their territory or airspace in the event of a war between Israel and Iran.

There are also economic incentives for the rapprochement. A railway project running partly through Azerbaijan will link Russia to Iranian seaports, out of reach of Western sanctions. Last fall, Azerbaijan and Iran jointly broke ground on a bridge that would connect the main part of Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan. And when Mr. Raisi and Mr. Aliyev met on Sunday, at the border between the two countries, they were inaugurating a jointly built hydroelectric dam on the Aras River.

“Some may not like our meetings and our joint successes,” Mr. Raisi told Mr. Aliyev on Sunday, according to the Azerbaijani president’s office. “The main thing is that we have implemented together what is good for our countries, states and peoples.”

Born in 1964, Mr. Amir Abdollahian held a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Tehran, according to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

He was fluent in Arabic and his diplomatic experience focused on Iran’s relationships in the Middle East. He spent five years as deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs from 2011 to 2016 and three years as Iran’s ambassador to Bahrain from 2007 to 2010.

His tenure as foreign minister was starkly different to that of his predecessor, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the moderate, American-educated diplomat who helped broker the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers including the United States. Mr. Zarif made that deal in close collaboration with John F. Kerry, who served as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, and he was later heard on a leaked audiotape discussing a rivalry with General Suleimani.

After he was confirmed as foreign minister in 2021, Mr. Amir Abdollahian emphasized that Iran’s relationships with its neighbors would be a top priority, and he quickly took a tougher stance against the United States in talks about reviving the nuclear deal, which former President Donald J. Trump had abandoned.

Mr. Amir Abdollahian was also a key figure in the spillover from the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, which prompted Israel to go to war in Gaza. Iran backs several armed groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Mr. Amir Abdollahian had been vocal about the threat of a broader conflict for months before Iran’s shadow war with Israel burst into the open in April, when Israel killed senior military leaders in a strike on an Iranian embassy complex in Syria and Iran fired a volley of drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation.

Mr. Amir Abdollahian repeatedly condemned the United States for backing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In an interview with The New York Times in November, he said, “If the U.S. continues its military, political and financial support of Israel and helps manage Israel’s military attacks on Palestinian civilians, then it must face its consequences.”

Mr. Amir Abdollahian’s deputy for political affairs, Ali Bagheri Kani, who on Monday was named “caretaker” of the Foreign Ministry, has been leading the Iranian delegations that have secretly and indirectly negotiated with the United States in Oman on at least three occasions over the past year. The talks addressed the Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, the targeting of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iran’s proxies, and a cease-fire in Gaza.

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

Russia: President Vladimir V. Putin sent a condolence letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling Mr. Raisi a “wonderful person” and a “true friend of Russia.” Mr. Putin said Mr. Raisi had made an invaluable personal contribution to deepening relations between the two countries. Mr. Putin has relied on Iran to provide drones for his war against Ukraine, and has strengthened ties with the Iranian government amid his standoff with the West.

India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “saddened and shocked” and that “India stands with Iran in this time of sorrow.” The two governments have been expanding trade ties, with India recently signing an agreement to develop a strategic Iranian port, despite the threat of American sanctions.

Pakistan: The nation declared a day of mourning out of solidarity with “brotherly Iran,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wrote on social media.

The European Union issued a statement expressing condolences and sending “its sympathies to the families of all the victims and to the Iranian citizens affected.”

China: A spokesman for Beijing’s Foreign Ministry said “the Chinese people have also lost a good friend.” and that China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, had extended condolences. He added that “China will continue to support the Iranian government and people” and was “willing to work with Iran to further deepen the China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership.”

Iraq: The government of Iraq said it would observe a day of mourning as a sign of “solidarity with the feelings of sadness and pain.” Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq fought a brutal war with Iran in the 1980s. But the majority Shiite Arab country grew close with Tehran in the wake of the U.S. invasion, and its government is seen as under the influence of Iran. Iran also counts several Iraqi Shiite militias among its regional network of proxies.

Turkey: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wished “God’s mercy for my brother” Mr. Raisi, as well as for Mr. Abdollahian. “We will stand by our neighbor Iran in these difficult and distressing times, as we have done many times,” Mr. Erdogan said in a statement.

Egypt: President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi asked “Allah the Almighty to envelop President Raisi and the deceased with his mercy and grant solace and comfort to their families.” After years of frosty relations, Egypt and Iran had discussed renewing ties over the last year, though they had not appeared to make much progress by the time of Mr. Raisi’s death.

Lebanon: The country declared a three-day period of mourning, the NNA news agency reported, with flags to fly at half-mast.

South Africa: President Cyril Ramaphosa called Mr. Raisi “a remarkable leader of a nation with whom South Africa enjoys strong bilateral relations.” South Africa last year backed Iran’s admission to the BRICS group of developing nations, a multilateral organization that fashions itself as a competitor to international alliances dominated by the West.

Mujib Mashal, Gulsin Harman, Vivian Yee, Paul Sonne, Erika Solomon and Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting.

Vice presidents in Iran are typically low profile, operating more as players within the government than as public figures.

“Iran’s vice presidents have traditionally not been contenders to succeed their bosses,” said Robin Wright, a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center in Washington. “The bigger question,” she added, “is who will the regime allow to run for the office.”

Mr. Mokhber is around 68 years old and became first vice president in August 2021. He is originally from Khuzestan Province in Iran’s southwest, bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf. He was a deputy governor there, and during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s served as a member of the Revolutionary Guards medical corps.

One of Mr. Mokhber’s relatively few high-profile appearances came when he and three other senior Iranian officials went to Moscow in October 2022 to complete a sale of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles to Russia, for use in the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Raisi chose him as vice president after Mr. Mokhber held senior positions in some of Iran’s most powerful organizations, including the Mostazafan Foundation, Sina Bank and Setad, a conglomerate entirely controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei that has billions of dollars in assets and was involved — not entirely successfully — in efforts to make and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine.

All three organizations are part of an opaque network of financial entities that are tied to the Iranian state, although they are not directly state-owned. They are also connected to projects that are priorities for the supreme leader and his inner circle.

Mr. Mokhber’s involvement suggests that he has been a successful behind-the-scenes player who is familiar with the financing networks that are important to the official Iranian power structure.

The Mostazafan Foundation, where Mr. Mokhber worked in the early 2000s, is officially a charity but is described by the U.S. Treasury as “a key patronage network for the supreme leader” that includes holdings in key sectors of Iran’s economy, including finance, energy, construction and mining. It is the subject of sanctions by the U.S. Treasury because it is controlled by Mr. Khamenei, and the Treasury said it was created in part “to confiscate and manage property, including that originally belonging to religious minorities” in Iran, including Baha’is and Jews.

The Treasury says the foundation funnels some of its money to individuals and entities in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that have been involved in terrorism and human rights abuses.

The Sina Bank has faced sanctions by the U.S. Treasury and the European Union for financing Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program.

Mr. Mokhber appears to have risen to the top of Iran’s political leadership in part because of the close relationship he developed with Iran’s supreme leader, dating from at least 2007 when he joined the leadership of Setad. Within a few months of his appointment to Setad, Mr. Mokhber had founded the Barakat Foundation, which has a number of companies under its aegis including a major Iranian medical and pharmaceutical company.

While his relationship with the supreme leader will be important while elections are being organized, analysts say that a much larger group of high-ranking officials around Mr. Khamenei will determine how this sensitive period in Iran will be handled.

“The regime is at a tipping point — politically, economically, and even militarily,” Ms. Wright said, noting Iran’s large-scale aerial attack on Israel last month that was nearly entirely intercepted, which she called “a humiliating failure.” Low turnout in parliamentary elections in March was also a sign of trouble for Iran’s theocracy, she added.

“It is very nervous about its future and the durability of its core ideology,” she said.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

Exactly what role Mr. Raisi played in critical decision-making in Tehran about Iran’s nuclear strategy was always a matter of dispute; the program is under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, a power center unto itself. But American officials say that after nearly reaching an agreement with Iran through European intermediaries two years ago, efforts to negotiate have all but collapsed.

Just last week, the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, who also died in the helicopter crash, met with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, who was demanding better access to Iran’s sprawling nuclear facilities.

The nuclear program, and the question of whether Iran will seek a weapon or leverage its status as a threshold power that could produce one quickly, looms over other, more regional confrontations. When Iran shot 300 missiles and drones at Israel last month, the United States coordinated with Israeli and other regional forces to take them down. But the whole exchange, which calmed after a relatively modest Israeli response, was a reminder that the country sharply expanded its missile program, and its reach, under Mr. Raisi — and is turning to techniques meant to overwhelm Israeli defenses, likely a lesson of the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Iran is arming the Houthis — Shiite militants who have taken over most of northern Yemen and attacked shipping in the Red Sea — and providing them with intelligence from at least one Iranian ship. It is providing arms and technology to Hamas and Hezbollah, efforts that also expanded under Mr. Raisi’s rule. And U.S. officials warned recently that as the presidential election approaches, they expect an increase in Iranian hacking attempts.

“Iran is becoming increasingly aggressive in their efforts,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. It seeks “to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions, as we have seen them do in prior election cycles.”

In the event of the president’s death, the vice president takes over and must organize an election within 50 days, said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, an independent conflict prevention agency.

That, he said, would be “a major challenge for a country that is in the midst of a severe crisis of legitimacy at home and daggers drawn with Israel and the United States in the region.”

In the last two years the country has witnessed a domestic uprising, the Iranian currency plunging to a record low, water shortages intensified by climate change and the deadliest terrorist attack since the 1979 founding of the Islamic Republic.

Parliamentary elections in March showed just how serious that crisis of legitimacy had become for Iran’s ruling class after millions of Iranians boycotted the vote and a far-right faction made notable gains.

“That just shows how unpopular the Islamic Republic currently is at home,” Mr. Vaez said, describing “a deepening rift between the state and the society.”

The economy remains in shambles because of U.S. sanctions, mismanagement and corruption. Iran’s currency fell to a record low in late March, just as its people were celebrating the Persian New Year. Inflation in the country has been painfully high for years, often exceeding 30 percent.

Prospects for a return to a deal with the West to limit Iran’s nuclear program, which would bring sanctions relief, appear dim.

In 2022, the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of the country’s morality police ignited monthslong protests nationwide, led by women and girls who tossed off their head scarves in defiance and demanded an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule. The government responded with a violent crackdown — just as it did to quell protests in 2019.

And in January, two explosions in the city of Kerman killed more than 80 people and injured more than 200. The Islamic State, a declared enemy of Iran, claimed responsibility.

Attacks between Israel and Iran this spring were the latest development pushing the country to a boiling point — and were a departure from the shadow warfare the two countries have waged for decades, raising fears of a regional conflagration pulsing outward from Gaza.

Iran backs and helps arm Hamas, the Palestinian group that led the Oct. 7 assault on Israel, which responded with a bombing campaign and invasion of the Gaza Strip, killing more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health authorities. Iran also supports armed groups around the region that have declared their solidarity in a battle against Israel, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Yemen’s Houthi militia.

But analysts say that Iran is eager to avoid being dragged into all-out war.

In April, Iran responded to a deadly Israeli attack on its embassy compound in Damascus, Syria, by launching a barrage of more than 300 drones and missiles directly at Israel for the first time. Few of Iran’s drones and missiles found their targets — a fact that military experts and defense officials said was probably by design.

The crash also raises questions about who would become Iran’s supreme leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 85, Mr. Vaez said. Mr. Raisi has been seen as a possible successor.

Mr. Vaez said that Mr. Raisi has been viewed as “predictable for the system — and that’s the reason he was chosen as president and was being groomed for the top job.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq instructed his country’s interior ministry and other relevant parties to offer to help with the search for the missing helicopter, according to Bassem al-Awadi, a spokesman for the Iraqi government. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian network, said it was preparing 10 search and rescue teams consisting of 50 people to assist.

The European Union activated its Copernicus satellite system to offer emergency mapping services to help Iranian officials gain better visibility of the area where the crash is believed to have occurred, according to the bloc’s chief for crisis management, Janez Lenarcic. He said the E.U. had done so after a request for assistance from Iran.

The foreign ministry of Saudi Arabia — a regional rival that re-established relations with Iran last year after a seven-year split — said that the kingdom “stands beside the brotherly Iranian Islamic Republic in these difficult circumstances and was prepared to offer any assistance Iranian authorities need.”

Iranian state television reported that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, a close ally of Iran, had called and spoken to the country’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, and offered Russia’s help “in full capacity.” Mr. Mokhber told state television that Iran “appreciates Russia’s help.”

May 19, 2024, 1:38 p.m. ET

May 19, 2024, 1:38 p.m. ET

In an address carried live on state television, he said that all of the country’s security and governance will be handled by other officials and there will be no disruption to border security or national security.

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CreditCredit…Iranian Red Crescent Society via Storyful