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“I see the country’s political elite more divided than anytime in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Rafsanjani, one of the republic’s founding fathers, the man who made Khameini Supreme Leader, is now in the opposition.”

“I see the country’s political elite more divided than anytime in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Rafsanjani, one of the republic’s founding fathers, the man who made Khameini Supreme Leader, is now in the opposition.”

It seems clear that the 75-year-old is at the center of a fight for the future of the Islamic Republic. Mr. Rafsanjani’s vision of the state, and his position in his nation’s history, is being challenged by a new political elite led by Mr. Ahmadinejad and younger radicals who fought Iraq during the eight-year war.

A camp of pragmatic clerics and politicians led by Rafsanjani, while loyal to the revolution's principles, wants to build better ties with the West and a more friendly image of Iran."What is clear is that the leadership is far more polarized and splintered than has been clear in the past," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Now that the leader has made clear he was supportive of Ahmadinejad and sharing the same vision of the future of the Islamic Republic, it can be taken as a major defeat for Rafsanjani and for the political options he promotes," said Frederic Tellier, an Iran expert in the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

Rafsanjani was president between 1989 and 1997, but failed to win a third term when in 2005, losing to Ahmadinejad in a runoff. He was a close follower of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of Iran's Islamic Revolution. He now heads the Expediency Council, a body that arbitrates disputes between parliament and the unelected Guardian Council, which can block legislation.He also is the head of the powerful Assembly of Experts, which comprises senior clerics who can elect and dismiss the country's supreme leader.

A daughter of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a rival of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been released from detention, state television said on Monday. Iran's English-language Press TV had reported that Faezeh Rafsanjani and four other relatives of the former president were detained during an unauthorized protest in Tehran on Saturday. The four other relatives were freed earlier.

Last week, the semi-official Fars News Agency said Faezeh and her brother Mehdi had been barred from leaving Iran.

According to a report in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, Rafsanjani is contemplating the formation of a distinct body of clerics that would serve as an alternative to the ruling council of ayatollahs. The report stated that the former president, who is based in the town of Qom, which is thought of as a religious stronghold, has already consulted other prominent clerics on possible future steps against his chief rival, Khamenei.

When he was first elected president in 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad showed his fealty to the leader, gently bending over and kissing his hand. On Saturday, the leader demonstrated his own enthusiasm for the re-elected president, hailing the outcome as “a divine blessing” even before the official three-day challenge period had passed. On Sunday, Mr. Ahmadinejad flaunted his achievement by mounting a celebration rally in the heart of an opposition neighborhood of Tehran

In many ways, his victory is the latest and perhaps final clash in a battle for power and influence that has lasted decades between Mr. Khamenei and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who, while loyal to the Islamic form of government, wanted a more pragmatic approach to the economy, international relations and social conditions at home. Mr. Rafsanjani aligned himself and his family closely with the main reform candidate in this race, Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister who advocated greater freedom — in particular, greater freedom for women — and a more conciliatory face to the West. Another former president and pragmatist, Mohammed Khatami, had also thrown in heavily with Mr. Moussavi.

The three men, combined with widespread public support and disillusionment with Mr. Ahmadinejad, posed a challenge to the authority of the supreme leader and his allies, political analysts said. The elite Revolutionary Guards and a good part of the intelligence services “feel very much threatened by the reformist movement,” said a political analyst who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. “They feel that the reformists will open up to the West and be lenient on the nuclear issue,” he said. “It is a confrontation of two ways of thinking, the revolutionary and the internationalist. It is a question of power.”

the accusations and the insults that Ahmadinejad directed at some of the most senior politicians such as Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammed Khatami and even Natiq Nouri – who is one of the most senior advisers to the Supreme Leader whose children Ahmadinejad accused of accumulating wealth illicitly – not only deepens divisions between different branches of the government but also brought these divisions into public view for the first time and in an unprecedented manner.

In the letter, Rafsanjani requested that Khamanei break his silence but what happened on Saturday morning, a few hours after the elections, and even before the final results were announced, was that Khamanei rushed to congratulate Ahmadinejad and endorsed the results. That was not normal at all because usually after elections the Council of Guardians and the Ministry of Interior await complaints that may be raised by parties taking part in the elections, expecting there to have been irregularities. Presidential candidates have the right to raise complaints before the results are verified but the Supreme Leader did not wait for this process to take place and he quickly congratulated Ahmadinejad who in turn called on his supporters to celebrate in Vali Asr in Tehran and Iranian state television began to broadcast messages of congratulations from various leaders and presidents to Ahmadinejad on his reelection.

if the results weren’t final and the candidates could raise their complaints how could the Supreme Leader declare his support for the results? The Supreme Leader’s behavior caused a lot of serious questions to be raised by the grand Ayatollahs in Iran and members of the Assembly of Experts headed by Rafsanjani, which has the right to dismiss the Supreme Leader according to the Constitution. It raised many questions about the Supreme Leader’s validity.

In an unprecedented public appeal, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani urged the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to rein in the president, who in the debate last week accused Rafsanjani of corruption.

The outburst came as supporters of Ahmadinejad's most serious rival – the leading reformist contender Mir Hossein Mousavi – kept up the pressure with a second day of mass rallies.

Khamenei, who had previously backed Ahmadinejad, last week also rebuked the president for his remarks in the debate.

Former Iranian President Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered to be the second most important figure in the country's regime, is looking into different ways to end the political crisis in Iran, and is mulling the possibility of setting up a new religious body, Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported on Monday.

According to the report, the former president and head of the cleric-run Assembly of Experts who is also one of defeated reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's top supporters, has relocated from the flammable capital of Tehran, to the Shiite holy city of Qom, where the country's religious leaders sit.

Rafsanjani arrived in the city a few days ago and met with several religious leaders and members of the Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for monitoring Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  

Originally the constitution allowed for the selection of either a single individual to the post of Supreme Leader or a council of appropriate individuals to run the post. The selection process of the Assembly of Experts would be done by continuously reviewing his/their performance (Articles 108 and 111). Later revisions to the constitution removed the potential for a council of individuals, making it so only a single individual could be elected by the Assembly as Supreme Leader.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected the chairman of the Assembly of Experts during its morning session on 04 September 2007 [Shahrivar 13, 1386]. Rafsanjani’s election is significant because prior to the meeting of the Assembly of Experts, the conservative supporters of the president tried to advance their own candidates Mohammad Taghi, Mesbah Yazdi, and Ahmad Jannati for the head of the assembly with deliberate and sometimes hidden attacks on Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Despite these attempts and the positioning of Ahmad Jannati, chairman of the guardian council, as a rival candidate to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the conservatives failed to achieve their goal.

According to a well-placed source in the holy city of Qom, Rafsanjani is working furiously behind the scenes to call for an emergency meeting of the Khobregan, or Assembly of Experts--the elite all-cleric body that can unseat the Supreme Leader or dilute his prerogatives. The juridical case against Khamenei would involve several counts. First, he would be charged with countenancing a coup d'état--albeit a bloodless one--without consulting with the Khobregan. Second, he would stand accused of deceitfully plotting to oust Rafsanjani--who is the Khobregan chairman and nominally the country's third-most-important authority--from his positions of power. Third, he would be said to have threatened the very stability of the republic with his ambition and recklessness.

Rafsanjani's purported plan is to replace Khamenei's one-person dictatorship with a Leadership Council composed of three or more high-ranking clerics; this formula was proposed and then abandoned in 1989 by several prominent clerics. Rafsanjani will likely recommend giving a seat to Khamenei on the council to prevent a violent backlash by his fanatic loyalists. It is not clear if Rafsanjani will have the backing of the two-thirds of the chamber members needed for such a change, though the balance of forces within the Khobregan could be tipped by the events unfolding in the streets. As a symbolic gesture, Rafsanjani is said to favor holding the meeting in Qom--the nation's religious center, which Khamenei has diminished--rather than in Tehran, where it has been held before.

According to a report by the now-banned website Rooyeh.com, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly of Experts, had meetings in the city of Qom, with some of the high ranking clerics including the plenipotentiary representative of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The dates of the meetings are not specified

According to this report, an anonymous source claimed that Rafsanjani had reminded the Ayatollahs of how Ayatollah Khomeini managed such crises in the early days of the Islamic revolution. The source also claimed that half of the Assembly of Experts were supporting the idea of declaring a “leadership counsel” (instead of a one person leadership)

t's rumble time in Tehran. At dozens of intersections in the capital of Iran thousands of students are protesting on a recent Friday around midnight, as they do nearly every night, chanting pro-democracy slogans and lighting bonfires on street corners. Residents of the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods converge in their cars, honking their horns in raucous support. Suddenly there's thunder in the air. A gang of 30 motorcyclists, brandishing iron bars and clubs as big as baseball bats, roars through the stalled traffic. They glare at the drivers, yell threats, thump cars. Burly and bearded, the bikers yank two men from their auto and pummel them. Most protesters scatter. Uniformed policemen watch impassively as the thugs beat the last stragglers.

These Hell's Angels are part of the Hezbollah militia, recruited mostly from the countryside. Iran's ruling mullahs roll them out whenever they need to intimidate their opponents. The Islamic Republic is a strange dictatorship. As it moves to repress growing opposition to clerical rule, the regime relies not on soldiers or uniformed police (many of whom sympathize with the protesters) but on the bullies of Hezbollah and the equally thuggish Revolutionary Guards. The powers that be claim to derive legitimacy from Allah but remain on top with gangsterlike methods of intimidation, violence and murder.

Who controls today's Iran? Certainly not Mohammad Khatami, the twice-elected moderate president, or the reformist parliament. Not even the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a stridently anti-American but unremarkable cleric plucked from the religious ranks 14 years ago to fill the shoes of his giant predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, is fully in control. The real power is a handful of clerics and their associates who call the shots behind the curtain and have gotten very rich in the process.

The Iranian reformist camp is looking to limit Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's power amid the continued violence in the country over the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian sources told the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

In the report, published Thursday, one of the sources was quoted as saying that the "reformist alliance," including defeated presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as a number of religious leaders from the city of Qom, were leading a move aimed at "limiting the absolute power of the Supreme Leader."

According to the source, Rafsanjani, who currently heads the Assembly of Experts, returned to Tehran on Wednesday after consulting with religious leaders in the holy city of Qom on the possibility of limiting Khamenei's power by having him answer to the Assembly.

Ahmadinejad still has strong support of the religious establishment and many of the poor, both inside and outside of the capital. "Our supporters are many and we don't have to gather in the streets like this," Hossein Ghorbani, a taxi driver in Tehran, said.

"I support Ahmadinejad because he is not stealing and is with the people. He cares about us."

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former Iranian president and a powerful figure in Iran's clerical leadership, on Tuesday urged the country's supreme leader to take action against Ahmadinejad over his remarks about the reformists. He wrote to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that millions of Iranians had witnessed "mis-statements and fabrications" in a televised election debate last week, when Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani of corruption. "I am expecting you to resolve this position in order to extinguish the fire, whose smoke can be seen in the atmosphere, and to foil dangerous plots," he said in the letter published by the semi-official Mehr news agency. Fourteen high-ranking clerics from the city of Qom, the supreme leader's base, echoed Rafsanjani's remarks, expressing "deep concern andregret" that Iran's image had been harmed in the debate. "Accusing those who were not present at that debate and could not defend themselves is against our religion," they said in a statement.

A political party affiliated with Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former president and key member of the Iranian regime, on Sunday called on Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the opposition leader, to form a “political bloc” that would pursue a long-term campaign to undermine the “illegitimate” government. Hossein Marashi, spokesman for the Kargozaran, stayed clear of directly challenging the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but told the Financial Times in a telephone interview that Mr Moussavi was now the leader of an opposition that was not without options.

“With the lack of legitimacy of the Ahmadi-Nejad government, sooner or later the country’s management will face various crises,” he said. “Mr Moussavi should set up an official political front which can embrace the defenders of the real Islamic republic . . . against those who are distorting it and are represented by Mr Ahmadi-Nejad.”

Adding to the tension, footage on the Facebook networking site showed a young woman supporter of Mr Moussavi being shot in the chest during the Saturday protests. The graphic footage, which was widely viewed, showed the woman dying in front of her father who desperately tried to save her.

The office of the president is generally seen as more powerful today than when it was established three decades ago. In the early years of the Islamic Republic, presidential powers were limited, with the regime's constitutional framers taking care not to give the office excessive strength for fear of a possible coup.

In an interview with CFR.org, Milani said Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was an effective president due to his personal relationships and political charisma, a dynamic that was lost in 1997 with the election of Mohammad Khatami. "Khatami didn't have that kind of relationship with the Supreme Leader" that Rafsanjani did

After the elimination of the post of prime minister in 1989, executive duties were consolidated in the office of the presidency.

The 1979 revolution transformed the Rafsanjani clan into commercial pashas. One brother headed the country's largest copper mine; another took control of the state-owned TV network; a brother-in-law became governor of Kerman province, while a cousin runs an outfit that dominates Iran's $400 million pistachio export business; a nephew and one of Rafsanjani's sons took key positions in the Ministry of Oil; another son heads the Tehran Metro construction project (an estimated $700 million spent so far). Today, operating through various foundations and front companies, the family is also believed to control one of Iran's biggest oil engineering companies, a plant assembling Daewoo automobiles, and Iran's best private airline (though the Rafsanjanis insist they do not own these assets).

The gossip on the street, going well beyond the observable facts, has the Rafsanjanis stashing billions of dollars in bank accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg; controlling huge swaths of waterfront in Iran's free economic zones on the Persian Gulf; and owning whole vacation resorts on the idyllic beaches of Dubai, Goa and Thailand.

Rafsanjani's youngest son, Yaser, owns a 30-acre horse farm in the super-fashionable Lavasan neighborhood of north Tehran, where land goes for over $4 million an acre. Just where did Yaser get his money? A Belgian-educated businessman, he runs a large export-import firm that includes baby food, bottled water and industrial machinery.

"There are very interesting things that are taking place right now. Some of my sources in Iran have told me that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who is the head of the Assembly of Experts -- the eighty-six member clerical body that decides who will be the next Supreme Leader, and is, by the way, the only group that is empowered to remove the Supreme Leader from power -- that they have issued an emergency meeting in Qom.

Although the president has the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), the clerics still have considerable power over the country's charitable foundations (Bonyads). These multibillion dollar business organizations don't report their income or pay taxes. They report directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Their participation in the economy is crucial. They could make life difficult for Ahmadinejad's presidency by increasing their business clout in areas where the IRGC is trying to muscle in. These industries include energy, construction and the import/export sector. Last year, these clerics scored a major victory. Bonyade Mostazafin (Charity foundation for the dispossessed) was allowed to buy and sell oil, allowing them to compete directly with Iran's National Oil Company. This raised the fury of Ahmadinejad's supporters. As means of checking Ahmadinejad's power, they could expand further into this sector, or compete in the lucrative construction sector. These companies also have huge financial assets. These can be used to finance new businesses which compete directly with the IRGC.

They could also side with Ayatollah Rafsanjani. It is an accepted fact that Rafsanjani financed part of Mousavi's campaign. This obviously dented Ahmadinejad's popularity. So much so, apparently, that Ayatollah Khamenei felt compelled to assist the president by allowing fraud. Rafsanjani is already a millionaire many times over. Should the clergy start helping him financially, using his political muscle in the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, he could further challenge Ahmadinejad politically.