The decision by Iran's supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, to formalize six senior military and security appointments within 48 hours is less a matter of personal appointments than the closing chapter of a five-month period of improvisation.

Taken together, the appointments announced on August 10 show that the new supreme leader is trying to transform a chain of command created under emergency conditions during the war — set up after Israeli and American strikes that killed much of Iran's top military leadership — into a permanent structure built around people he trusts.

Rebuilding from top to bottom, for the second time

The scale of the void Khamenei was trying to fill is easily lost among the list of names.

Mohammad Baqeri, the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, was killed in the early days of the 12-day war in June 2025. His successor, Abdolrahim Mousavi, lasted only a few months before he too was killed – in the February 28 attack that also killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For about five months after that, the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces had no chief at all; coordination fell to the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Staff, which was then headed by Ali Abdollahi.

The same thing happened with the chain of command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC): the IRGC chief, Hossein Salami, was killed in the 12-day war; his successor, Mohammad Pakpour, was killed along with Mousavi in ​​the 40-day war earlier this year; while Ahmad Vahidi led the IRGC in an acting capacity since then, until Khamenei’s decree on August 10 made the appointment official and promoted him to major general.

The fact that two parallel chains of command operated for months under leaders who were acting without being formally appointed is itself an indication of how badly Iran’s senior officer structure had been battered by the Israeli and American attacks. The new decrees don’t just appoint new people; they end a period during which Iran’s military hierarchy existed more as a wartime improvisation than as a chain of command officially stamped by the supreme leader.

Integration, not just replacement

The most interesting signal is found in the language of the decree appointing Abdollah, which calls for “completing the integration” of the Armed Forces General Staff with the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters – a merger that the new supreme leader attributes to a strategy initiated by his father.

This, combined with the fact that a new commander of Khatam al-Anbiya was not appointed alongside Abdollah's promotion, suggests that the position itself may be being incorporated into the General Staff structure, rather than being filled – thus a structural consolidation rather than a mere personnel decision.

If Khatam al-Anbiya is effectively incorporated into the General Staff, it would mark a true centralization of Iran's wartime coordination apparatus under a single command, instead of the semi-parallel structure that existed under the now-assassinated Ali Khamenei.

The Return of Taeb

Perhaps one of the appointments most overlooked by the media is also the one that carries the most weight domestically: Hossein Taeb as commander of the Basij paramilitary force.

Taebi is not a wartime replacement in the same sense as Abdollahi or Vahid; he is a returnee. He built his career in the Ministry of Intelligence, before leaving it, and then created a parallel intelligence apparatus within the Revolutionary Guards — the IRGC’s notorious Intelligence Organization — which he led until his dismissal in mid-2022.

The language of the decree appointing Taeb reinforces the domestic dimension: it calls for the strengthening of a "popular intelligence network" and the realization of the slogan "every Iranian, a member of the Basij", directly referring to the pro-Islamic Republic street mobilizations, which have continued since the beginning of the 40-day war, as a basis for expanding "in defense of the Islamic Revolution".

While the other five appointments respond to the problem of military losses, this appointment answers another question: whom does the new supreme leader trust to oversee the population and manage internal threats, at a time when the state's legitimacy is being tested by dynastic succession and wartime hardships.

Paris-based analyst Reza Alijani, speaking on Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said the appointments — including the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei as Iran’s new security chief — are largely about Khamenei “activating and displaying” his authority, rather than any real change in leadership. Most of the people promoted, he noted, have already served in the Islamic Republic’s executive apparatus, suggesting that the same military logic in foreign policy and the same logic of domestic security are simply being reproduced.

He singled out the appointments of Taeb and Rezaei as, essentially, the return to the scene of “politically and security-bankrupt figures,” but warned that, in terms of internal security, not much actually changes: the same apparatus, even without Taeb at the helm, had killed thousands of people during the widespread protests in January.

However, Alijani's broader assessment is that, despite the factional differences, the reorganization "does not carry any significant political meaning" for either domestic or foreign policy. In the end, he says, "the system's interest" will "narrowly prevail over its ideology," at a cost that ordinary Iranians will pay for with their pockets and lives./ REL