Who is Ali Larijani? The Iranian leader asks Trump 'America First' or 'Israel First'

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, on Wednesday (March 4), accused US President Donald Trump of dragging Americans into an unfair war with Iran at the behest of Israeli ambitions. He further claimed that 500 US troops were killed in the previous five days of the war, suggesting that Washington is downplaying its casualties in “Operation Epic Fury”. Larijani has stepped up to fill the power vacuum left following the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on March 1. Following Khamenei's death, Larijani refuted media reports in the United States claiming he had made a new push to resume nuclear talks with Washington.

"Mr Trump, with Netanyahu's clownish antics, dragged the American people into an unfair war with Iran. Now let him do the math: with over 500 American troops killed (in these past few days), is it still "America First," or "Israel First"?"- wrote Ali Larjani in a social media post on X. “The saga continues. The martyrdom of Imam Khamenei will exact a heavy price from you. God willing,” he further added.

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Who is Ali Larijani?

Larijani, a Khamenei loyalist, belongs from Islamic clerical family that lived in the upper echelon of Iranian aristocrats. The Larijani family has been compared to the Kennedys of the US by the Times Magazine in 2009, due to their institutional and embodied capital in Iran. At the age of 20, he married Farideh Motahari, the daughter of Morteza Motahhari, a close confidant of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini. He had previously served as the Speaker of Parliament, Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force and had been involved in the nuclear negotiation between the US and Iran.

Larijani has a deep understanding of Western Philosophy, often called a “mathematician philosopher”, and wrote books on 18th-century German Idealist and Enlightenment thinker Emmanuel Kant. Politically, Larijani is a conservative pragmatist. But following the US attacks on Iran, Larijani had delivered a message of fervour.

“America and the Zionist regime [Israel] have set the heart of the Iranian nation ablaze,” he wrote on social media. “We will burn their hearts. We will make the Zionist criminals and the shameless Americans regret their actions.”