Former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi has been gravely wounded, and his wife killed, in a targeted United States-Israeli strike on their Tehran home.
As head of Iran’s foreign affairs council, Kharazi has been an influential figure in guiding his country’s policy. He advised supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was assassinated on February 28th when the US-Israel war on Iran began.
Kharazi was recently involved in Pakistani efforts to arrange a meeting between senior Iranian officials and US vice president JD Vance.
Last week Kharazi was quoted as saying Iran had not rejected negotiations and was open to indirect talks with the US although he believed there is “no room for diplomacy with the US”.
He explained this assessment in a CNN interview by saying that US president Donald Trump “had been deceiving others and not keeping his promises, and we experienced this two times in negotiations – that while we were engaged in negotiations, they struck us.”
Iranian mistrust of Trump flows from his 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 agreement reached with US president Barack Obama. The agreement saw Iran limit its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.
It that deal had survived, Tehran’s nuclear research would have been frozen and Iran could have been reinstated as a member of the international community instead of being shunned and sanctioned.
[ Trump pledges to take Iran ‘back to the stone ages’ in televised addressOpens in new window ]
Born in Tehran in 1944, Kharazi earned a BA in Arabic studies and an MA in education at the University of Tehran. While working as a teaching fellow at the University of Houston in Texas between 1975-76, he studied for his doctorate.
After Iran’s 1979 revolution, Kharazi held media, academic, governmental, and diplomatic positions and chaired Iranian delegations at international conferences. He has lectured at university campuses in the United States and Europe and has written extensively on foreign policy issues.
During their protracted campaign against Iran, the US and Israel have killed Iranian nuclear scientists and senior figures, including head of the national security council Ali Larijani and commander of Iran’s Basij militia Gholamreza Soleimani.
The most high-profile US assassination was ordered by the Trump in January 2020. The victim was Qasem Soleimani, who was commander of the Quds Force, an elite branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At that time, Soleimani was regarded the second most powerful person in Iran after Khamenei.