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23-05-2023
TEHRAN: Ali Shamkhani, one of the top figures within the Iranian establishment, has left his post as the country’s security chief after almost a decade.
State media confirmed on Monday that President Ebrahim Raisi, as the head of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), has appointed Ali Akbar Ahmadian, a senior commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as Shamkhani’s replacement.
Shamkhani had been appointed as the secretary of the SNSC in September 2013 and has been instrumental in shaping Iran’s security policies in the past decade.
He appeared to announce his departure late Sunday by posting an excerpt of a cryptic poem on Twitter from 16th-century Iranian poet Muhtasham Kashani.
Shamkhani leaves his post after having successfully completed a detente with Saudi Arabia, which saw the two countries agree to restore diplomatic ties after a seven-year rift in a China-brokered deal in March.
Tehran is also on track to improve its diplomatic relations with other neighbors across the region while also increasingly cozying up to Russia and China, as its ally Syria has also been welcomed back into the Arab League.
Relations with the West, however, remain highly confrontational, amid stalled efforts to restore Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and after protests rocked Iran last September. The SNSC had been in charge of the nuclear file, while also being one of the main entities managing the local unrest, but Shamkhani was only one of the voices at the council.
At an address on national security that turned out to be his farewell speech, Shamkhani said the world order is changing and Iran needs to adapt its macro policies to it.
“A new world order at first would mean a disruption of the current order and disorder on the back of the evolution of the current order, but this is not inherently positive, and our readiness and role in the new world order is what can make its changes positive for us,” he said.
He also discussed the so-called “axis of resistance” of forces that are supported by Iran across the region, saying: “The current circumstances can turn out to be in favor of the axis of resistance, but we must not turn the doctrine of resistance into a doctrine of domination.”
In a meeting last week with Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and Iran’s ambassadors in other countries, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also alluded to a changing world order, saying it will be a “rough process filled with unexpected events” that Iran needs to gear up for.
No detailed official reason has been given for Shamkhani’s departure, but it may indicate the country is heading in an ever-more conservative direction as Shamkhani was regarded as relatively pragmatic. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
