According to reports, Iran's senior leadership wants to remove Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi because he supports the position of the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in nuclear negotiations with the United States.
According to Iran International, Araghchi has served more as an assistant to Ahmad Vahidi, the commander-in-chief of the Guard Corps, than as a cabinet minister, according to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf.
The opposition-aligned press stated that Araghchi has been acting on Vahidi's orders for the past two weeks without telling Pezeshkian, citing people acquainted with ongoing talks between the nation's legislative and executive. The President threatened to fire Araghchi if it persisted.This occurs one week after Ghalibaf, a former IRGC commander, was kicked out of the peace negotiations due to pressure from the Guard Corps (IRGC), which claimed he was trying to broaden the scope of the talks to include nuclear-related topics. During the initial round of negotiations with the United States, Ghalibaf headed the Iranian mission in Islamabad.
While Israel has been using "decapitation" strikes to skim layers of the Islamic Republic's leadership, the IRGC is said to have increased its dominance within Iran's state structure.
In a system that despises dynastic succession, Iran's current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who hasn't been seen in public since taking the position, succeeded his father, Ali Khamenei.Both Ali Larijani, Iran's de facto wartime leader and security head, and his successor, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, were IRGC commanders before he was killed in an Israeli strike last month. Preserving the legacy of the 1979 revolution is the paramilitary's goal.
Politicians associated with Paydari, a powerful ultra-hardline group, battled with the moderates on nuclear issues, according to a previous Financial Times report. While moderates have urged for further engagement with the West as a way to secure sanctions relief for Tehran's financially constrained economy, hardliners are against talks with the US.Iran presented a united front, declaring that "in our Iran, there are no hardliners or moderates," despite Trump's suggestion that Iran's leadership was divided.