Who is Hossein Salami, Iran's Revolutionary Guard leader killed in Israeli strikes?
Iranian state television confirmed the head of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was killed in Israel's strikes Friday morning.
Gen. Hossein Salami was the chief of one of the country's most powerful centers, and his death was a tough blow to Iran's embattled leadership, which has had a series of setbacks in the past 20 months of Middle Eastern war and unrest.
Salami rose to power six years ago and had a history of threatening the U.S. and Israel.
Here's a closer look.
Powerful arsenal of missiles
Iran's Revolutionary Guard was created after its 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since it was established, it's evolved from a paramilitary, domestic security force to a transnational force that has come to the aid of Tehran's allies in the Mideast, from Syria and Lebanon to Iraq.
It operates in parallel to the country's existing armed forces and controls Iran's arsenal of ballistic missiles, which it has used to attack Israel twice during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
Salami, 65, was appointed as head of the guard in 2019 by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The appointment followed U.S. President Donald Trump's decision during his first term to withdraw the U.S. from the international nuclear deal with Iran and restore crippling sanctions. It also followed Trump's designation of the Guard as a terrorist organization.
Salami joined the guard at the outbreak of the bloody 1980s Iran-Iraq war. He later rose to head its air forces and was serving as a deputy commander in the guard when he was appointed.
Harsh rhetoric
Like other guard leaders, Salami routinely delivered speeches with harsh rhetoric towards Israel. In a 2016 speech he said there was 'fertile ground' for the 'annihilation, the wiping out, and the collapse of the Zionist regime'.
He also threatened the United States.
After the U.S. killed the powerful head of the guard's Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, in a drone strike outside Baghdad's airport in 2020, Salami threatened to retaliate against American and Israeli commanders. The Quds, or Jerusalem, Force is an elite wing of the Guard that oversees foreign operations.
Five days later, Iran launched ballistic missiles at two bases in Iraq housing American troops, causing injuries but no fatalities among soldiers there.
After Soleimani was killed, Salami said that both the U.S. and Israel should know that 'if they threaten our commanders, none of their commanders will find a safe place' to live.
Emerging from the shadow war
Israel and Iran have run a shadow war for years, but last year the two attacked each other directly.
When an Israeli strike killed seven guard members, including two Iranian generals at an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, Salami vowed to retaliate.
Weeks later, Salami ordered an operation that launched more than 300 drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in an unprecedented revenge mission that pushed the Middle East closer to a regionwide war.
Israel said that 99 per cent were intercepted with several ballistic missiles reaching Israeli territory, causing minor damage to an air base.
In October Israel pounded Iran with a series of airstrikes in response to missile attacks into Israel from Iran earlier in the month.
Israel's military said it targeted 'missile manufacturing facilities used to produce the missiles that Iran fired at the state of Israel over the last year.' Israel also weakened the country's air defenses, which helped clear the way for Friday's attacks.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
For Iranian-Americans, a potential U.S. attack on the regime brings complex feelings
Nearly 20 years ago, Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani set out with other entertainers on an Axis of Evil comedy tour, hoping laughs could subvert stereotypes. Being Iranian, he jokes, is like a Facebook relationship status: It's complicated. Perhaps never more than in the past week, as Israeli munitions have pounded the country where he was born, where 90 million people live as inheritors of a proud history – but under the rule of an authoritarian Islamic regime. 'We love our land. We love our history and we don't want that destroyed. We don't want our people destroyed, either,' Mr. Jobrani said in an interview Friday. Born in Tehran, he knows how people have suffered under what he calls 'a brutal dictatorship.' His own cousins are among those who have fled the Iranian capital in recent days, seeking safety in more distant places. Still, he has little hope that bombs and missiles will win their liberty from oppression. 'War has never helped solve anything – not in the 21st century,' he said. 'We haven't really come out of a war, especially in the Middle East, and gone: 'See? It worked!'' Roughly a half-million Iranian-Americans live in the U.S., a population whose largest concentration lies in Los Angeles – 'Tehrangeles' – but whose numbers reach across the country. Turmoil in the country of their birth has accustomed them to anxiety. 'I had a bit where I said, I just wish I was Swedish, life would be so much easier,' Mr. Jobrani said. 'Being Iranian, it's constant – they're always in the news and always the enemy.' Analysis: Collapse of Iranian regime could have unintended consequences for U.S. and Israel Yet many, like Mr. Jobrani, see little gain in using military force to attack the regime that has ruled the country since 1979. In the days before Israel launched strikes against Iran last week, the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, commissioned a poll that showed 53 per cent of Iranian-Americans opposed U.S. military action against Iran, while nearly one in two said diplomacy represents the best path to preventing the country from obtaining nuclear weapons. Only 22 per cent said military operations are the best hope to forestall a nuclear-armed Iran. 'The strong outcry in the Iranian community is, 'Don't get involved in this. Stop the war. Stop the bombing. Let the Iranian people breathe and give them a chance to chart their own future,' said Ryan Costello, a policy director with NIAC. 'The movement for democracy in Iran has to be one that's led by Iranians, not a hostile government.' For others, however, the attacks on Iran have also brought a flourish of hope. In the NIAC poll, 36 per cent of respondents said they supported U.S. military action against Iran. Now, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordering military strikes against the country where she lived until her late 20s, Farnoush Davis cannot suppress a feeling of hope. 'It's very exciting,' she said. Opinion: Iranians deserve a path to freedom that is also free from violence Ms. Davis grew up with little love for the ruling authorities who demanded she cover her head, made Western music illegal and lay U.S. flags on doorsteps for people to tread on. As a young woman, she rejected the hijab, stepped carefully around the flags, developed a fondness for Michael Jackson – and ultimately left for the U.S., where she now lives as a citizen in Idaho. For people in Iran, the downpour of Israeli munitions, offers a fresh chance 'to take down the Islamic republic, get their lives back and go for freedom,' she believes. For nearly a half-century, she added every attempt to demand change from within has failed. 'We need to have some help from outside,' she said. 'I appreciate what Netanyahu is doing.' For those whose lives are intertwined with Iran, the past two years have given even greater cause for fear. Professor Persis Karim, the Neda Nobari Chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, said she can only imagine how terrified people in Iran must feel because they have watched Israel's military campaign in Gaza. Analysis: Trump's two-week pause on Iran puts him at centre of world's biggest drama She has family members in Tehran and spoke with a cousin after the first night of bombing. Her cousin lives with her elderly mother and didn't want to leave. 'Two days later, I got a text and she said: 'We're leaving,'' Prof. Karim said, speaking Friday from a hotel room in Los Angeles after a Thursday night screening of a film she co-directed and executive produced about Iranian-Americans. Sadly, she says, few people attended, likely because they are worried, sick and anxious. Prof. Karim said she is 'ashamed' of the U.S.'s behaviour and that of President Donald Trump especially. 'I think the whole thing is absolutely disgusting in terms of international leadership,' she said. She also criticized Israel for suggesting it is time for Iranian people to rise up, calling it 'completely nonsense.' 'People cannot rise up and liberate themselves from an oppressive government when bombs are being lobbed at them, especially at civilians and civilian sites,' she said. 'I think what it's doing, it's going to harden the Islamic Republic.' Mr. Jobrani, meanwhile, has found himself placing his hopes for a better Iranian future not in Mr. Netanyahu or Mr. Trump, but in others who he sees as more determined to seek peace – perhaps European diplomats, perhaps Chinese negotiators, perhaps even Russia's Vladimir Putin or U.S. conservatives like Steven Bannon and Tucker Carlson, who have publicly opposed U.S. entry into war with Iran. 'Maybe these other ideologues from his party can convince him not to escalate,' Mr. Jobrani said. It is, he said, 'a surreal time and situation.'
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Vance blames California Dems for violent immigration protests and calls Sen. Alex Padilla ‘Jose'
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Vice President JD Vance on Friday accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of encouraging violent immigration protests as he used his appearance in Los Angeles to rebut criticism from state and local officials that the Trump administration fueled the unrest by sending in federal officers. Vance also referred to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, the state's first Latino senator, as 'Jose Padilla,' a week after the Democrat was forcibly taken to the ground by officers and handcuffed after speaking out during a Los Angeles news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on immigration raids. 'I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,' Vance said, in an apparent reference to the altercation at Noem's event. 'I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn't a theater. And that's all it is.' 'They want to be able to go back to their far-left groups and to say, 'Look, me, I stood up against border enforcement. I stood up against Donald Trump,'' Vance added. A spokesperson for Padilla, Tess Oswald, noted in a social media post that Padilla and Vance were formerly colleagues in the Senate and said that Vance should know better. 'He should be more focused on demilitarizing our city than taking cheap shots,' Oswald said. Vance's visit to Los Angeles to tour a multiagency Federal Joint Operations Center and a mobile command center came as demonstrations calmed down in the city and a curfew was lifted this week. That followed over a week of sometimes-violent clashes between protesters and police and outbreaks of vandalism and looting that followed immigration raids across Southern California. Trump's dispatching of his top emissary to Los Angeles at a time of turmoil surrounding the Israel-Iran war and the U.S.'s future role in it signals the political importance Trump places on his hard-line immigration policies. Vance echoed the president's harsh rhetoric toward California Democrats as he sought to blame them for the protests in the city. 'Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, by treating the city as a sanctuary city, have basically said that this is open season on federal law enforcement,' Vance said after he toured federal immigration enforcement offices. 'What happened here was a tragedy,' Vance added. 'You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law and they had rioters egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job. That is disgraceful. And it is why the president has responded so forcefully.' Newsom's spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement, 'The Vice President's claim is categorically false. The governor has consistently condemned violence and has made his stance clear.' In a statement on X, Newsom responded to Vance's reference to 'Jose Padilla,' saying the comment was no accident. Jose Padilla also is the name of a convicted al-Qaida terrorism plotter during President George W. Bush's administration, who was sentenced to two decades in prison. Padilla was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport during the tense months after the 9/11 attacks and accused of the 'dirty bomb' mission. It later emerged through U.S. interrogation of other al-Qaida suspects that the 'mission' was only a sketchy idea, and those claims never surfaced in the South Florida terrorism case. Responding to the outrage, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said of the vice president: 'He must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.' Federal immigration authorities have been ramping up arrests across the country to fulfill Trump's promise of mass deportations. Todd Lyons, the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has defended his tactics against criticism that authorities are being too heavy-handed. The friction in Los Angeles began June 6, when federal agents conducted a series of immigration sweeps in the region that have continued since. Amid the protests and over the objections of state and local officials, Trump ordered the deployment of roughly 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to the second-largest U.S. city, home to 3.8 million people. Trump has said that without the military's involvement, Los Angeles 'would be a crime scene like we haven't seen in years.' Newsom has depicted the military intervention as the onset of a much broader effort by Trump to overturn political and cultural norms at the heart of the nation's democracy. Earlier Friday, Newsom urged Vance to visit victims of the deadly January wildfires while in Southern California and talk with Trump, who earlier this week suggested his feud with the governor might influence his consideration of $40 billion in federal wildfire aid for California. 'I hope we get that back on track,' Newsom wrote on X. 'We are counting on you, Mr. Vice President.' Vance did not mention either request during his appearance on Friday. ___ Associated Press writers Julie Watson and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles and Tran Nguyen in Sacramento contributed to this report.
CTV News
4 hours ago
- CTV News
Putin says Russia has shared peace proposals with Israel and Iran
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Friday, June 20, 2025. (Vyacheslav Viktorov/ Roscongress Foundation via AP) ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he has secured Israel's pledge to safeguard Russian personnel at Iran's Russia-built nuclear power plant and that he has reached out to both sides to try to end the week-old war. Answering questions on a variety of issues at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin also warned Ukraine that it could lose more territory if it keeps rejecting Russia's conditions for peace. Putin said Russia has proposed 'some ideas' for a possible settlement between Iran and Israel that are currently being discussed. He said Moscow asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ensure the security of Russian personnel who are working to construct two more reactors at the nuclear power plant in Iran's port of Bushehr and that he also raised the issue with U.S. President Donald Trump. 'Prime Minister Netanyahu has agreed with that, and President Trump has promised to support our legitimate demands,' Putin said. But he strongly rejected allegations that Moscow has failed to back its ally, Tehran, saying the Kremlin has maintained good ties with both Iran and Israel. He noted that Israel is home to nearly 2 million people from Russia and other former Soviet nations, 'a factor that we always have taken into account.' At the same time, Putin said, Russia has always met its obligations to Iran, adding that Moscow has firmly backed Tehran's right for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. He voiced concern about the spiraling conflict, saying we 'are strongly worried about what's going on around the Iranian nuclear facilities and possible consequences.' A tough warning to Ukraine Asked about Moscow's goals in Ukraine, Putin said the Russian military is moving to extend a buffer zone in Ukraine's Sumy region following a Ukrainian incursion last year into Russia's neighboring Kursk region. 'We have to create a security zone along the border,' Putin said, adding that the Russian troops have forged about 10 kilometres (about 6 miles) deep into the Sumy region and are approaching its capital of the same name, a city of about 270,000 people. 'They are creating a threat to us, constantly shelling the areas along the border,' he added. 'We don't have a goal to capture Sumy, but I don't exclude it in principle.' Putin reaffirmed his long-held claim that Russians and Ukrainians are 'one people,' declaring that in 'that sense, all of Ukraine is ours.' But he also said Russia is ready to recognize Ukrainian sovereignty while emphasizing that Kyiv must accept the 'realities' of Moscow's territorial gains and abandon its bid to join NATO as part of possible deal. 'We aren't seeking Ukraine's surrender, we want them to recognize the realities on the ground,' he said, adding that Moscow has repeatedly warned Ukraine that it would better make a deal. 'The logic of military action could only exacerbate your situation, and you will have to conduct talks from different positions that will be worse for you,' Putin said, addressing Ukraine. 'There is an old rule: Wherever a Russian soldier puts his foot, that belongs to us.' Asked by the session's moderator whether he is concerned by allegations that Ukrainian authorities could order the use of a 'dirty bomb' of radioactive material against Russia, Putin said such an action would be 'their last mistake' that would trigger a 'mirror' response from Russia in line with its nuclear doctrine. 'Our response would be very tough and, most likely, catastrophic' for both the government and the country, he said. 'I hope it will never come to that.' Putin added that while Russia doesn't have information that Ukraine could mount such an attack, 'we assume that some people may develop such ideas in their sick imagination.' Putin says he won't allow Russia to fall into a recession Putin hailed Russia's economic outlook, saying it has managed to curb inflation and ease its reliance on energy exports. His optimistic account contrasted with somber statements by some members of his government who warned at the same conference that Russia could face a recession. Economic Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said Thursday the country is 'on the brink of going into a recession.' Putin mentioned the recession warnings, but emphasized that 'it mustn't be allowed.' He pointed out that manufacturing industries have posted steady growth, allowing the country to reduce its reliance on oil and gas exports. 'The perception of Russian economy as based on raw materials and dependent on hydrocarbons exports have clearly become outdated,' Putin said, adding that the economy grew by 1.5 per cent in the first four months of 2025 and inflation has dropped from double digits to 9.6 per cent. Putin has used the annual forum to highlight Russia's economic prowess and encourage foreign investment, but Western executives have shunned it after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, leaving it to business leaders from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The economy, hit with a slew of Western sanctions, has so far outperformed predictions. High defense spending has propelled growth and kept unemployment low despite fueling inflation. Large recruiting bonuses for military enlistees and death benefits for those killed in Ukraine also have put more income into the country's poorer regions. But over the long term, inflation and a lack of foreign investments pose threats to the economy. Economists have warned of mounting pressure on the economy and the likelihood it would stagnate due to lack of investment in sectors other than the military.
