The roughly five-minute video of Mohammad-Bagher Kharrazi, released Wednesday, shows the head of the Hezbollah of Iran organization addressing a religious gathering, the kind of mosque pulpit from which much of Iran’s clerical politics is conducted. What he delivered from it was not a sermon but an organizational plan.
“Before Mr. Saeed Jalili ever said ‘I make the shadow government,’ we had formed the shadow government, and we still have it… We have 60 thick volumes of plans covering the smallest details of every organ and institution,” Kharrazi said, brushing aside the hardline politician who popularized the term.
“We have prepared plans for implementing the guardianship system, even for how to convert the Islamic Republic into an Islamic government. We have the organization and the planning. But because this transition has not happened, they are taking the Islamic Republic from us”
The Islamic Republic, he told the crowd, “has reached a stage where, in this form, it simply doesn’t work anymore.”
The arithmetic of a takeover
What separates the video from ordinary hardline grievance is that Kharrazi laid out numbers, methods and targets.
Each follower, he said, should recruit 17 people, and each of those another 17. “If we do this and organize at least 250 people in every city, with a thousand cities that makes 250,000 people,” he said.
He offered to bankroll the first gathering himself, “at Hezbollah’s own expense,” promised a meeting of one hundred thousand, and told the audience the network would “surround all the ministries.” The crowd answered with a salavat, the blessing on the Prophet that in such gatherings signals assent.
At another point he set the threshold at 530 organizers per city, a figure drawn not from arithmetic but from devotion: in the abjad letter-numerology cherished in his circles, he ties the number to the name of Fatemeh, the Prophet’s daughter. The two figures do not reconcile, and may not be meant to.
He then described the endgame: “With one announcement, everyone comes to Tehran, and that single announcement will finish the work. Mr. Khamenei and the government must understand that a 250,000-strong organization stands ready to move.”
The government of President Masoud Pezeshkian, he assured his listeners, “will not reach its end. Have no doubt.”
Contempt for the republic, president by president
Kharrazi’s case against the republic half of the Islamic Republic was delivered as a roll call. “Why should Mr. Hashemi win a vote in this country? Why should Mr. Ahmadinejad win a vote in this country? Why should Mr. Rouhani win a vote? Why should Mr. Pezeshkian win a vote?” The list, spanning nearly every president of the past four decades, implied that the office itself, not its occupants, is the error.
For the current occupant he reserved open abuse, calling Pezeshkian “this buffoon” who “understands nothing,” and cursing the physician he blamed for promoting him: “God damn the accursed Marandi, Khamenei’s doctor, who foisted Pezeshkian on the nation.”
He damned the Guardian Council for approving such candidates, a complaint carrying its own footnote: the same council disqualified Kharrazi himself when he tried to run for president in 2013.
The faithful, he complained, have been reduced to carrying other men’s loads. “Hezbollahi forces in this country have become pack mules,” he said.
“What business do we have being pack mules for Ghalibaf, who understands nothing of the religion of Islam?”
‘Mojtaba is more radical than his father’
The video’s most consequential claims concern the man Kharrazi presents as his patron. Describing “forty years of friendship, not mere acquaintance, and numerous private meetings,” he told the crowd that the new supreme leader wants what he wants: “Mojtaba’s thinking is far more radical than his father’s.”
He offered what he framed as an insider’s history: that Mojtaba Khamenei was cast out of his father’s office for three years by its deputy chief of staff, confined to his home and reduced to ferrying intelligence letters, with even some of his circle pushed away.
Kharrazi claimed credit for protecting the movement through that period: “They wanted to tear out Hezbollah by the roots. I did not let them.”
None of these accounts can be independently verified, and they describe a man who has not been seen or heard in public since his selection five months ago.
The claims also come with a fresh credibility problem attached. Only days earlier, the leader’s office publicly branded Kharrazi’s previous quotations of Mojtaba Khamenei, that Pezeshkian’s next resignation after 28 attempts would be accepted, as unauthenticated and false, warning that such material “serves the objectives of the ill-wishers and sworn enemies of the Iranian nation.” Pezeshkian denied the resignation as well.
Kharrazi’s response to that rebuke may be the most revealing sentence he has produced.
In a statement styled like a senior cleric’s communique, he said he accepts the denial “out of respect” for the late and current leaders, “but we hope that after the important coming changes in those offices, this denial will still stand.”
The changes he has in mind are not abstract. In the same week, Kharrazi announced that the new leader intends to remove Mohammad-Bagher Zolghadr as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and hand the post to Mohsen Rezaei, his military aide.
“They are going to replace Mr. Zolghadr, and Mr. Mohsen Rezaei will take his place,” he said, adding that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has been told he has no right to intervene in the negotiations. A man rebuked for speaking in the leader’s name answered by announcing the leader’s next appointments.
The family and the record
Kharrazi, 65, is as embedded in the Islamic Republic’s aristocracy as a cleric can be. His father, Ayatollah Mohsen Kharrazi, sits in the Assembly of Experts; his uncle, Kamal Kharrazi, ran Iran’s diplomacy for years and headed its Strategic Council on Foreign Relations until died from injuries sustained in recent Israeli airstrikes in April; his brother Sadegh is a veteran diplomat; his sister is married to Masoud Khamenei, another of Ali Khamenei’s sons.
Reuters has reported that the Nobitex cryptocurrency exchange, sanctioned by Washington for helping the Revolutionary Guards evade sanctions, belongs to the Kharrazi family.
His own record is a catalogue of the spectacular. In his 2013 presidential bid he promised to lift sanctions within months, to recover “the territories separated from Iran,” from Tajikistan to Azerbaijan, without a drop of blood, and to triple the value of Iran’s crashed currency, vowing to bring the dollar from above 3,000 tomans back down to 1,000.
The Guardian Council struck him from the ballot, and even before it did, the Hezbollah coordination council of East Azarbaijan province publicly disowned his group, accusing him of misusing the movement’s name and the leader’s, and reminding him that by the leader’s own explicit guidance, any private quotation attributed to him is to be considered untrue. Thirteen years later, the leader’s office is issuing him the same reminder about a different Khamenei.
In clips that went viral this year, he proposed building a nuclear bomb and detonating it in the Atlantic to send a tsunami toward the American coast, and mused about igniting a race war inside the United States.
He studied under Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, the late theorist whose school long argued that the republic’s elections were a concession to be outgrown, which is to say the manifesto is not his invention, only its loudest current recital.
Three readings of one video
The puzzle is not what Kharrazi said but what it means that he can keep saying it. In a state that imprisons filmmakers and poets for far less, a man has now twice in one week put words in the supreme leader’s mouth, insulted the president on camera and announced a plan to encircle the ministries, without a knock on his door.
However it is read, the collision at the heart of the video is documented on both sides. The government’s own leaked polling shows a society that has drifted decisively from clerical rule, with barely nine percent wanting things to stay as they are. The loudest organizing energy inside the system, on this week’s evidence, wants to move the opposite way.
One reading is that the leader’s office will now be forced to do more than issue denials, and that Kharrazi’s next video will be his last.
A second is bleaker for the system: that there is no functioning leader capable of silencing anyone, and the in-law is filling a vacuum with his own voice.
A third, voiced in exile commentary, is that Kharrazi is not speaking for the present leadership at all but building a following for the day the question of who leads is reopened, including a future in which his own brother-in-law’s household sits closer to the throne.
Under any of the three, the fact stands: five months into the new reign, the most detailed public plan for ending the Islamic Republic has come not from its opponents but from inside its founding family’s circle, and it points toward more theocracy, not less.