This hard-line Iranian general is a major player in talks with US over
war
[May 21, 2026]
By JON GAMBRELL
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — As negotiations with the United
States hang in the balance, a hard-line Iranian general linked to
notorious attacks at home and abroad over the past decades is believed
to have seized a place near the center of power.
Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, who heads Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary
Guard, has become a major player in formulating Iran’s tough stance in
negotiating a possible end to the war with the United States, experts
say. He is believed to be part of a small clique in direct contact with
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who remains in hiding
after being reportedly wounded in the Feb. 28 Israeli strikes that
killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Like everything in Iran since the war began, who ultimately controls
decision-making remains uncertain. As people within the upper ranks of
Iran's theocracy vie for power, they can gain or lose favor quickly.
Vahidi himself hasn't been seen publicly since Feb. 8, weeks before the
war began. On Thursday, Iranian media carried contradictory reports on
Vahidi meeting with Pakistan's interior minister in Tehran, who carried
a message regarding negotiations with the U.S. and met with other top
Iranian officials.
A longtime veteran of the ruling system, Vahidi helped shape Iran’s
support of militant groups across the region, is accused of a role in
the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina, and in 2022, led
domestic security forces in a bloody crackdown on protesters.
Elevated to Guard commander this year after his predecessor was killed
early in the war, he leads the most powerful force in Iran, with its
arsenal of ballistic missiles and its fleet of small boats threatening
Persian Gulf shipping.
“Vahidi and members of his inner circle have likely consolidated control
over not only Iran’s military response in the conflict but also Iran’s
negotiations policy,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of
War said.
Iran’s war strategy has been to keep a stranglehold on the Strait of
Hormuz, blocking oil and gas exports and causing a global energy crisis.
At the same time, it has struck hard against oil facilities, hotels and
infrastructure in Gulf Arab nations.
In negotiations, it has held out against U.S. demands that it surrender
its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, betting that it can outlast
the U.S. in the ongoing standoff and that President Donald Trump will be
reluctant to resume outright war that could bring greater damage to
America’s Gulf allies.
That likely reflects Vahidi’s confrontational style. “He comes from that
mindset of unending revolution, unending resistance,” said Kenneth
Katzman, a senior fellow at the The Soufan Group, a New York-based think
tank. Vahidi believes “the U.S. needs to be challenged at every turn,”
said Katzman, a senior Iran expert who advised the U.S. Congress for
over 30 years.
Vahidi boasted in January that Iran’s defense power has developed to
make it a “high risk for any military action by an enemy.”
Vahidi now a focal point in talks
Pakistan hosted talks in April between an Iranian delegation, led by
parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and an American one, headed
by U.S. Vice President JD Vance. But it ended without any deal.
Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi returned home to face
criticism from inside the theocracy suggesting they were too willing to
make concessions. Qalibaf had to insist publicly that the talks had the
support of the supreme leader.
Since then, Vahidi has become the main point of contact for those
negotiating with Iran, said a regional official with direct knowledge of
the mediation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss
the sensitive diplomacy.
The extreme seclusion and unknown condition of the supreme leader have
fueled speculation about jockeying among leaders for access to Khamenei
and influence over him. In early May, President Masoud Pezeshkian, who
many see as sidelined from influence by the Guard, went out of his way
to say he “got to see our dear leader” and spoke to him for around two
hours.
But Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, said it’s likely the new supreme leader “is in lockstep
with a more hard-line (Guard) — similar to his father, but in a more
emboldened and uncompromising form.”
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Nominee for defense minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi delivers a speech to
parliament on the qualification of proposed ministers of Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 1, 2009. (AP
Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
Analyst Kamran Bokhari wrote that figures like Vahidi “are not just
managing war — they are actively reshaping succession, consolidating
authority around a weakened supreme leader, and effectively
‘capturing’ the state through crisis governance.”
Vahidi forged by years leading Quds Force
Born Ahmad Shahcheraghi in Iran’s southern city of Shiraz in 1958,
Vahidi like many young men after the 1979 revolution joined the
Revolutionary Guard and fought against the invasion by Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein that sparked a bloody, eight-year war.
Vahidi entered the Guard’s nascent intelligence arm and soon was
overseeing operations outside Iran. He gained the favor of powerful
patrons, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a later president.
Rafsanjani said in his autobiography that Vahidi was involved in the
1980s Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration sold
weapons to Tehran in an effort to free hostages held by
Iranian-backed militants in Lebanon. The U.S. later used the money
from those sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Rafsanjani later intervened to protect Vahidi when then-Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought to prosecute members of
the Guard who failed to stop an incursion by armed fighters from an
Iranian exile group in the late 1980s during the war.
Around this time, Vahidi took over the newly formed Quds, or
Jerusalem, Force. Over decades, the Quds Force helped create a
network of proxy militant groups and allied governments around the
Middle East. The Quds Force under Vahidi helped mastermind the 1994
bombing targeting Argentina’s largest Jewish community center,
killing 85 people and wounding 300 others, prosecutors say. Iran has
denied involvement.
American investigators also believe that under Vahidi, Iran
organized the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, killing 19
U.S. service members and wounding hundreds. Tehran has denied being
involved in that attack as well.
Vahidi left the Quds Force in 1998. In 2010, while he was defense
minister, the United States imposed sanctions on him over alleged
involvement in Iran’s nuclear program and its pursuit of weapons of
mass destruction.
More recently, as interior minister, Vahidi oversaw police units
involved in a bloody, monthslong crackdown on protests over the 2022
death of Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being
arrested for not properly wearing the mandated headscarf to the
liking of authorities.
An Iranian newspaper later published a classified document that
showed Vahidi’s Interior Ministry ordered security agencies to
monitor and photograph women not wearing the hijab, something he had
denied was taking place.
At around that time, Vahidi said in public comments that calls to
remove the hijab were a “colonial plan” by Iran’s enemies trying to
undermine the Islamic Republic. “The hijab has been a big barrier
against the progress of effete Western culture,” he said.
Vahidi’s role makes reaching an accord with Iran that much more
difficult for the U.S. — as does the continued obscurity over Iran’s
leadership.
Trump wants a single interlocutor in Iran for negotiations, but "the
whole system has changed,” said Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert at
the Middle East Institute.
“It is not a one-man show. Vahidi is one alongside others," Azizi
said. "Some we know and some we don’t know.”
___
Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, Sarah El Deeb in
Beirut, and Amir Vahdat and Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran,
contributed to this report.
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