There is a photograph making the rounds on social media, taken in Tehran on the night of March 17. A man in a plain black jacket walks through a crowd of ordinary people. No armoured vehicle. No security cordon. No bodyguards. His country is under bombardment. Air strikes have been hitting Iranian cities for nineteen days. And the man in charge of Iran’s entire national security apparatus has decided the safest place to be is outside, among his people, walking.

By morning, he was dead. Israeli bunker-busting bombs found him.

His name was Ali Larijani — Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, former Speaker of Parliament, former nuclear negotiator, and the most consequential back-channel diplomat the Islamic Republic had produced in four decades. A philosopher by training, a security official by vocation, and — by the testimony of every Western and Gulf diplomat who had sat across from him — the one man in Tehran who believed that the interests of the Islamic Republic could be advanced through conversation as well as through force.

They killed the peacemaker. Now they want peace.

I write from a particular vantage point on this war. I am from Kupwara, Kashmir. My father was martyred in 1992 defending a Hindu temple against militants. I served thirty-three years in the Indian Army as a Kashmiri Muslim — and spent years as Director of Military Operations, watching from inside the machinery of institutional power how decisions about conflict are made, and often, unmade. I know what it costs when the people who believe in talking are silenced by the people who believe only in force.

What has happened with Ali Larijani is a strategic catastrophe of the first order. And I do not think it is being adequately understood, either in the Western capitals that are prosecuting this war or........

© Greater Kashmir