Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Is Still Useful
On the first day of the Iran war, the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei overshadowed news of a strike near the home of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013. Many who remembered his term in office—marked by Holocaust denial, atom-bomb fetishism, and shoving Islamic revolutionary ideology down the throats of a country already weary of it—celebrated his reported assassination. As president, he was the symbol of a smarmy kind of theocratic fascism. “All my friends have got nuclear weapons—even Ahmadinejad,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s character complained in the 2012 movie The Dictator. “And he looks like a snitch on Miami Vice!”
Among those who have followed Ahmadinejad’s post-presidential career, however, his targeting was more of an enigma. Since leaving office, Ahmadinejad has harshly criticized the Iranian government, and as a result, Iran’s Guardian Council has formally excluded him from running for president. For more than a decade, he has been known more as a regime opponent than as a supporter. Why would the United States or Israel assassinate him? “I don’t understand why Israel would want to kill him in the first place,” Meir Javedanfar, who co-wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad, told me. “Perhaps to settle scores? It makes no sense.”
The resolution to this puzzle may be that what appeared at first to be an assassination was no such thing. Contrary to early reports, Ahmadinejad is alive, his associates say. (They requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.) The circumstances of his survival may prove significant as the war drags on. Whatever the intent, Ahmadinejad’s associates say the strike was in effect a jailbreak operation that freed the former president from regime control. Their description of the chaotic sequence of events that began before the war suggests that Ahmadinejad has friends on the outside.
Long before the war, the government had posted a small number of bodyguards near Ahmadinejad, nominally to protect a prominent citizen but also to keep tabs on him. The regime has never been sure what to do with him. He remains popular in Iran, and as an ex-president once close to the regime’s insiders (the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, allegedly rigged his election and reelection to the presidency), he is dangerously well informed about how the state works. In 2018, former Defense Minister Hussein Dehghan likened Ahmadinejad to “the door of the mosque, which can’t be burned or thrown away” without torching the mosque itself. “Arresting Ahmadinejad could unsettle the regime,” Javedanfar said. “He knows a hell of a lot about it.”
About a month ago, after the January protests, his freedom of movement was further reduced, his phones confiscated, and the contingent of bodyguards increased from single digits to about 50. The bodyguards were based a few hundred meters from Ahmadinejad’s residence itself, at the entrance to a cul-de-sac in Narmak, in northeast Tehran. They established a checkpoint to monitor the houses and high school on that street.
A February 28 strike hit not the residence, but the security forces nearby. (According to Al Jazeera, it also hit the school and killed two children.) In the ensuing mayhem, Ahmadinejad and his family evidently escaped their home and went underground. The government believed he had died, and his death was announced by official channels, as well as the reformist daily Sharq.
When rumors arose that Ahmadinejad had escaped, regime elements immediately suspected that he had been spirited away to take part in a coup. Ahmadinejad’s only public statement since the attack has been a brief eulogy for the supreme leader, calculated to show that Ahmadinejad was alive and to dispel speculation that he had declared himself an enemy of the state. His location is unknown to the government.
It is possible that Israel or the United States wanted to kill Ahmadinejad, but aimed poorly. That would be peculiar, because it would mean that the United States and Israel placed near the top of its kill list a politician who was no longer a friend to the regime. The alternative possibility, that Narmak was bombed to free Ahmadinejad, raises other questions. Why free Ahmadinejad only for him to go into hiding after? Why free him at all, given how long he has been out of power?
Ahmadinejad’s fans say that he has popular support, and that any postwar government will want him around to lend that support. If the current regime survives, it will need all the legitimacy it can get. If it does not, the United States might need someone with intimate (if outdated) knowledge of the Iranian state to be involved with what comes next. Ahmadinejad could still be useful.