Dossier 50 — Part 3
## Khomeini and the Liquidation
of the Co-Revolutionary Force#
Title: Then the Massacre of
Comrades Began!
#### Subtitle: Four Decades of Clerical Rule: A Historical Review of Executive Elimination Under Wilayat al-Faqih
**Investigative Report by: Abdelhaq Al-Sunaybi** *Al-Riyadh Newspaper* **Bani Sadr: The Case Study of an Iranian President Fleeing Khomeini’s Totalitarian Purges** ---
Historical precedents demonstrate that political coalitions formed strictly to oppose an existing regime almost invariably culminate in bloody internal confrontations once the revolutionary objective is achieved. This paradigm was starkly validated by the French Revolution of 1789, where its most prominent architects ultimately ascended the very guillotine erected to eliminate the old regime—including Maximilien Robespierre himself, who perished under its blade.
A identical structural sequence transpired following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 under Lenin, where the ruling faction systematically purged its political partners—a process that escalated exponentially during the Stalinist era, claiming the lives of cultural and political figures such as Maxim Gorky, Sergey Kirov, and Grigory Zinoviev. This historical pattern confirms that violent overthrows consistently transition into intra-revolutionary purges, wherein the most ruthless or strategically cunning faction consolidates absolute power.
The Khomeinist Revolution of 1979 did not deviate from these historical anomalies. The clerical regime initially set about neutralizing the remnants of the monarchical state before rapidly turning its apparatus against the very domestic partners who had facilitated the Shah’s overthrow. These political allies ultimately faced the gallows, perished under highly suspicious circumstances, or were driven into permanent global diaspora under the dictatorial framework of *Wilayat al-Faqih* (Guardianship of the Jurist).
As established in preceding dossiers, Khomeini was neither the sole architect nor the exclusive catalyst of the 1979 uprising; he was merely one of its multiple institutional pillars. The revolution was initially pluralistic rather than purely sectarian, encompassing a broad coalition of communists, liberals, secular nationalists, and traditional clerics. However, upon assuming power, Khomeini systematically drove tactical wedges between these leadership factions, liquidating them sequentially—establishing an eliminationist methodology that remains a permanent feature of the Supreme Leader’s apparatus against dissent.
### 1. Mahmoud Taleqani: The Neutralization of Moderation
Born in 1911 in northern Iran, Mahmoud Taleqani emerged from traditional theological studies in Qom to become one of the most prominent clerical opponents of the Pahlavi regime and a senior figure within the Freedom Movement of Iran. Maintaining continuous communication with Khomeini during his exile, Taleqani instrumentalized his vast domestic popularity to build the grassroots base that effectively shielded Khomeini from execution following his anti-Shah sermons, ultimately paving the way for the regime’s transition after the flight of the Shah. Consequently, Taleqani was appointed to the Revolutionary Council, with historical evidence indicating he served as its clandestine chairman.
However, ideological friction between the two figures accelerated rapidly due to Taleqani’s left-leaning socio-economic views and his explicit rejection of the absolute, unchecked executive powers granted to the clergy under the newly drafted constitution. Alongside Mehdi Bazargan, Taleqani sought to maintain a constitutional framework that limited clerical overreach.
Reflecting on this critical juncture, his son, Mojtaba Taleqani, noted: *"My father worked tirelessly to ensure that the post-revolutionary alternative would not degenerate into a clerical autocracy. He consistently urged secular and national forces to form a unified front, profoundly alarmed by clerical factions that were actively preparing to monopolize state power by suppressing the diverse opposition movements that had secured the revolution’s victory."*
The ideological schism culminated during a landmark Friday sermon delivered by Taleqani at Tehran University, where he publicly warned: *"I am profoundly alarmed by the imminent return of despotism to Iran—albeit under a new institutional guise,"* directly referencing the emergent clerical dictatorship. In immediate retaliation, Khomeini ordered the arbitrary arrest of Taleqani’s sons.
Following this direct confrontation, Taleqani withdrew from public life and departed Tehran for an undisclosed location. His calculated withdrawal triggered widespread civil unrest, with citizens taking to the streets chanting: *"O Taleqani, you are the soul of the revolution, we stand with you."* This immense public blowback embarrassed Khomeini, who subsequently pressured Taleqani into a televised appearance to mitigate the fallout of the Tehran University sermon.
In September 1979, the regime abruptly announced Taleqani’s death, attributing it to sudden cardiac complications. This official narrative was met with widespread skepticism, as Taleqani had no prior medical history of cardiovascular disease. His son later revealed: *"I was constantly beside my father, but due to family obligations, I had temporarily traveled to Mashhad with my mother. The hardline factions exploited this precise window; they removed his security detail and severed the residence's communication lines. When his health collapsed, there were four operational hospitals within the immediate vicinity of the house, yet he was denied medical evacuation to any of them. When the family formally requested an independent autopsy, the authorities summarily rejected the petition on the pretext that the deceased was a senior cleric. They summarily closed the case as a natural heart attack."*
With Taleqani’s highly suspicious demise, the revolution lost its most formidable internal voice of moderation—the one figure possessing the religious and popular legitimacy required to challenge Khomeini’s absolute clerical centralization.
### 2. Muhammad Kazem Shariatmadari: Rewarding the Savior with Humiliation
Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Kazem Shariatmadari, born in Tabriz in 1905, was an influential traditional Shia authority whose geopolitical strength resided in his immense leverage among Iran’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Azeris, rendering him an indispensable institutional pillar of the anti-Shah coalition and a key member of the Revolutionary Council.
Following Khomeini’s inflammatory anti-monarchical sermons in 1963, the Pahlavi authorities issued a formal death sentence against him. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari intervened directly to avert the execution by issuing an official religious decree recognizing Khomeini as a *Grand Mojtahed*—a supreme scholarly rank that, under the existing imperial constitution, provided absolute legal immunity against capital punishment and arbitrary arrest. This structural intervention saved Khomeini’s life, resulting in his subsequent deportation to Turkey rather than execution.
Following the 1979 transition, Shariatmadari founded the Muslim People's Republic Party, which almost immediately collided with the newly introduced constitutional framework of *Wilayat al-Faqih*. Shariatmadari viewed the concentration of absolute, unconstitutional authority within the office of the Supreme Leader as an existential threat to Iran's complex multi-ethnic and politically pluralistic social fabric, arguing that clerical involvement in governance should remain strictly advisory and limited.
> *"Post-revolutionary executions routinely begin with the expendable and conclude with the wise—and that, unfortunately, remains the precise tragedy of our revolution, for this regime has systematically liquidated its most visionary minds."* > — **Abu al-Hasan Bani Sadr**
>
Shariatmadari observed that Khomeini was systematically reconstructing the autocracy of the old regime, merely replacing imperial absolute power with unaccountable religious mandate. Recognizing Shariatmadari as a structural obstacle to total clerical hegemony, Khomeini moved to systematically neutralize him.
The crisis peaked when Shariatmadari endorsed peaceful mass demonstrations protesting the systematic exclusion of nationalist factions and ethnic minorities from the state apparatus. In 1982, the regime manufactured treason charges against him, accusing him of complicity in a foreign-backed conspiracy to assassinate Khomeini. In an unprecedented breach of Shia theological tradition, he was stripped of his title as a Grand Ayatollah, placed under rigorous house arrest, and forced—alongside his family members—to deliver coerced confessions on state television.
Denied access to adequate independent medical treatment during his prolonged house arrest, Shariatmadari’s health deteriorated rapidly following a diagnosis of advanced cancer. He passed away in April 1986. The regime forced his family to conduct a clandestine burial in the dead of night to prevent public assemblies or mass demonstrations. This effectively closed the chapter on the very man who had saved Khomeini from the Pahlavi gallows.
### 3. Sadegh Ghotbzadeh: The Execution of the Image Architect
Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, born in Tehran in 1936, was a fierce secular opponent of the Shah who initially resisted allying with clerical factions. Expelled from the United States in 1970 due to his intense anti-monarchical activism, he secured political asylum in Syria, later relocating to Paris in 1976 as a correspondent for the Syrian newspaper *Al-Thawra*. *(Ref: The Iranian Triangle, Shaul Bakhash, p. 93)*
In 1977, Ghotbzadeh joined Khomeini’s inner circle in Najaf, following him to Neauphle-le-Château, Paris, in October 1978. Operating as Khomeini’s chief international advisor, strategist, and translator during his Western exile, Ghotbzadeh was instrumental in cultivating Khomeini's deceptive international image, presenting him to Western media and governments as a human rights advocate seeking a democratic republic. Historical assessments indicate that without Ghotbzadeh’s sophisticated media manipulation, the clerical core could not have successfully obscured the radical nature of the governance system they were preparing for Iran.
Following the revolution, Ghotbzadeh was appointed Managing Director of National Television and subsequently Foreign Minister of the interim government, leading the Iranian delegation during the initial phases of the Iran hostage crisis. However, as the clerical factions moved to aggressively monopolize the parliament, Ghotbzadeh collided with the hardline core, ultimately resigning from political life to pursue philosophical studies.
In 1982, the regime arrested Ghotbzadeh, accusing him of orchestrating a plot to detonate explosives near Khomeini’s residence under the direct instigation of Ayatollah Shariatmadari. He was subjected to immediate military trial by a revolutionary tribunal on manufactured espionage charges. *(Ref: Abdel Raouf Al-Reidy, Journey of a Lifetime, p. 342)*
Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri later documented this betrayal in his official memoirs, *Recollections*, stating: *“The charges compiled against him were structurally fabricated, designed specifically to implicate and destroy Ayatollah Shariatmadari.”* Montazeri further revealed that Ahmad Khomeini visited Ghotbzadeh inside Evin Prison, offering a false pledge: *“Deliver a televised confession, and the Supreme Leader will issue an absolute pardon.”* Ghotbzadeh complied under extreme psychological duress, delivering the coerced televised statement; he was summarily executed by firing squad in 1982.
### 4. Abu al-Hasan Bani Sadr: The Flight of the Constitutional President
Abu al-Hasan Bani Sadr was born in 1933 in the Hamadan province to a prominent religious family; his father maintained close personal ties with Khomeini. Engaging early in the anti-Shah student movements, Bani Sadr faced multiple detentions before fleeing to Paris, where he joined Khomeini's exiled headquarters, eventually coming to view the cleric as his "spiritual father."
Khomeini strategically exploited Bani Sadr’s trust, utilizing his Western credentials to assure international observers of a democratic alternative where popular sovereignty would remain absolute. Once power was consolidated, however, these promises were systematically broken to facilitate a total clerical takeover.
Following the transition, Bani Sadr served as Minister of Finance and later as a commander during the initial phases of the Iran-Iraq War. Recognizing the immense human cost, Bani Sadr advocated for an early ceasefire in response to international mediation, an initiative that Khomeini flatly rejected, opting instead to exhaust an entire generation on prolonged battlefields.
Elected as the first President of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1980 with an overwhelming popular mandate, Bani Sadr increasingly resisted the extra-constitutional overreach of the clerical factions. His final tactical error occurred when he facilitated the publication of a comprehensive domestic opinion poll in the French journal *Le Monde*, revealing that his personal popularity stood at 80%, compared to Khomeini’s declining rating of 49%.
The clerical establishment viewed this public disclosure as a direct challenge to the theological infallibility of the Supreme Leader. Capitalizing on Khomeini's fury over Bani Sadr's peace initiatives and the publication of the poll, the hardline factions impeached him in parliament. Recognizing an imminent execution order, Bani Sadr went into hiding within Iran before coordinating with sympathetic Air Force elements to execute a daring aerial escape to France, where he remained in political exile until his demise. His trajectory proved that constitutional legitimacy via the ballot box remains entirely subordinate to the absolute veto of *Wilayat al-Faqih*.
### Conclusion
The structural evolution of the 1979 revolution demonstrates how an autocratic monarchy was replaced not by a democracy, but by a totalitarian clerical dictatorship that proved significantly more brutal than its predecessor—utilizing the very comrades who built it as its foundational victims.
### Strategic Analytical Review — FmBahrain Historical Archive
#### I. Systemic Structural Analysis
The historical trajectories of Taleqani, Shariatmadari, Ghotbzadeh, and Bani Sadr substantiate a clear sociological law governing radical revolutions: the operational necessity of post-revolutionary partner liquidation. The Khomeinist core deployed a sophisticated multi-stage strategy to achieve absolute centralization:
1. **The Convergence Phase:** Utilizing secular, liberal, and moderate religious actors as international and domestic instruments to secure widespread legitimacy and topple the monarchical apparatus.
2. **The Fragmentation Phase:** Strategically inciting institutional conflict between the various secular and left-wing factions to neutralize their collective bargaining power.
3. **The Elimination Phase:** Deploying the specialized state security apparatus to systematically liquidate individual partners once they attempted to enforce the democratic promises of the revolution.
#### II. The Three Institutional Patterns of Wilayat al-Faqih Liquidation
The historical evidence reveals three fixed, repetitive operational patterns utilized by the regime to enforce absolute conformity:
* **The Weaponization of Coerced Media Confessions:** Instrumentalizing state television to systematically degrade the ideological and moral authority of political opponents prior to their execution or house arrest (e.g., Shariatmadari and Ghotbzadeh).
* **Absolute Political Ingratitude as a State Strategy:** The systemic neutralization of figures who provided critical structural protection to the regime's founders during the pre-revolutionary era (e.g., Shariatmadari, who legally prevented Khomeini's execution in 1963).
* **The Deceptive Exploitation of Dissolution:** Offering false clemency or exploiting personal relationships through intermediary family members (such as Ahmad Khomeini) to extract compliance from high-ranking political prisoners before summarily executing them.
#### III. Empirical Implications for Modern Regional Security
The eliminationist pattern established between 1979 and 1986 is not a historical relic; it remains the foundational operational code of the Iranian state apparatus. The systemic purge of the "trench comrades" provides a critical stochastical index for contemporary geopolitical analysis: if a regime treats its own theological saviors, personal advisers, and constitutionally elected presidents with absolute elimination, it cannot under any circumstances maintain stable, rule-based international agreements, nor can it tolerate genuine domestic reform.
This structural continuity extends directly from the purges of 1982 to the permanent house arrest of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi since 2011, alongside the systemic execution of thousands of civil dissidents during the popular uprisings of 2009, 2019, and 2022. The administrative faces of the state modify dynamically; the eliminationist framework remains absolute.
**Compiled for Global Research and Archival Preservation** **Dhafer Hamad Al-Zayani** **Source: FmBahrain Historical Archive (May 2026)** ---
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