BEHIND THE IRAN HEADLINES Series, August 12, 2024, Alireza Jafarzadeh, NCRI-US Deputy Director
Masoud Pezeshkian, the new president of the Iranian regime, submitted his proposed cabinet list to the regime’s parliament for approval over the weekend.
The list is a muddled assortment of incompetent, corrupt, and criminal figures from both Ebrahim Raisi and Hassan Rouhani’s administrations. Raisi’s notorious Intelligence Minister, Esmail Khatib, and his head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Mohammad Eslami, are included in Pezeshkian’s cabinet list. Eslami’s past affiliations with the IRGC and his involvement in the regime’s nuclear weapons program were exposed in 2005 by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
For weeks, Pezeshkian had deceptively spoken about forming a so-called “national consensus government” as if such a concept were possible under a fundamentalist dictatorship. As an IRGC-affiliated source put it, “The notion of national consensus and internal cohesion is gradually unraveling.”
As expected, Pezeshkian’s cabinet list was met with immediate backlash, quickly sparking a fierce battle among the various factions and intensifying the ongoing war among the mafia gangs.
Pezeshkian’s list suggests that he has naively chosen to position himself somewhere between Rouhani and Raisi to save the faltering regime. However, in doing so, he has effectively thrown a potential political time bomb into the regime.
As the Iranian Resistance declared immediately after Raisi’s death last May, his demise was an irreparable, destabilizing, and strategic blow to Khamenei’s regime. Raisi was an irreplaceable element in Khamenei’s plan to solidify power and ensure a smooth leadership transition to preserve the ruling theocracy and its continuity.
The massive election boycott and ensuing factional infighting have exposed the fragility of Khamenei’s hold on power, making the regime more vulnerable to internal dissent and external pressures.
Denouncing Pezeshkian’s proposed cabinet, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, stated, “The overarching aim of the Iranian people remains the dismantling of Khamenei’s regime and the entire Velayat-e Faqih system, with the ultimate goal of establishing a democratic republic.” Indeed, a free Iran is imminent.