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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Why Bagher Ghalibaf and Abbas Araghchi are the most crucial negotiators in Iran war

For New Delhi, perhaps an interesting dimension of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s current role is his reported involvement in backchannel activities with the US via Pakistan.

We are now twenty-eight days into the Iran war. Some accounts I follow on social media raised how, by this point in the 2003 Iraq War, American forces had already reached a decisive point. They had dismantled the Iraqi military, captured Baghdad, ousted Saddam Hussein and secured the final regime stronghold in Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit in northern Iraq.

In the second Gulf War,  Iraq, for all practical purposes, had fallen. However, in the third Gulf War, Iran has been fighting back an economic war on adversaries that have a low tolerance for pain, showcasing ruthless endurance, typical of hardened regimes—a rueful point recently made by Iranian-origin scholar Karim Sajadpour in his piece for the Atlantic.

But comparisons, while tempting, are misleading. Iraq was all about a full-scale ground invasion—an overwhelming projection of American military power under the George Bush administration. By contrast, Operation Epic Fury (in collaboration with Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion) is about multiple axes of war—a conventional military air campaign, decapitating the Iranian Regime and an asymmetrical response from Iran primarily aimed at rising economic costs with hybrid means, and quite successfully so.

The objectives may echo past wars, but the modus operandi—and the looming economic crises —are far more complex.

And yet, amid this uncertainty, two names have steadily gained traction: the well-known Abbas Araghchi, the seasoned foreign minister of Iran, and the less-known Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Iran’s parliament, Majlis.

Both, notably, are said to have been removed from US and Israeli targeting lists for the ‘time being’—an extraordinary distinction considering how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) top brass, including the Supreme Leader, have been assassinated and continue being so. 

As I am writing this piece, reports have emerged on the killing of the IRGC naval commander in Bandar Abbas, and speculation on three battalions of US Marines landings on Kharg or Larak islands remain rife. The two interlocutors, Ghalibaf and Araghchi, were reportedly in Islamabad two days ago to relay Iranian conditions to the US. Ghalibaf is more........

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