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Mohtashamipour died at the age of 74. He has served as Iran’s ambassador to Syria.
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He was a close ally of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the 1970s, he formed alliances with Muslim militant groups across the Middle East.
After Iran’s Islamic Revolution, he helped found Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). When he was ambassador to Syria, he brought the IRGC troops to help form Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
In his later years, he slowly joined the reformist movement in Iran, hoping to change the theocracy of the Islamic Republic from within.
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He supported opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi in Iran’s Green Movement protests following the 2009 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in disputed elections.
“If all the people come to their senses, avoid acts of violence and continue their civil confrontation with it, they will win,” Mohtashamipour said at the time, though Ahmadinejad would eventually remain in office.
“There is no power that can go against the will of the people,” he continued at the time.
According to the news agency IRNAMohtashamipour died in a hospital in northern Tehran after contracting the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The cleric, who wears a black turban as a trademark in Shia tradition as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, has been living in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq, for the past 10 years following disputed elections in Iran.
Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised Mohtashamipour for his “revolutionary services”.
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