When on April 10, during a speech to the armed forces, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic Ali Khamenei declared that the Jewish state would soon be punished, the cameras of Iranian state TV framed the smiling face of Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the forces Revolutionary Guards aerospace fighters. A detail underlined by various analysts, who see the general as one of the masterminds of the attack launched by Iran against Israel in retaliation for the killing of 7 members of the Pasdaran in a raid on April 1st against the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
"There was a time when the enemy was in an attacking position and we were on defense but today it is our enemies who must strengthen their defensive systems to oppose us", declared last summer Hajizadeh, who since the 80 is involved in the Iranian missile program and since 2009 has been the head of the Pasdaran aerospace forces. Originally from Karaj, he joined the Revolutionary Guards as a sharpshooter in his early twenties and participated in the war with Iraq, occupying leading positions in the artillery and surface-to-surface missile divisions. The turning point in his career seems to have been the meeting with Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, founder of the Iranian ballistic missile program. It was he who proposed, in 1984, to entrust Hajizadeh with the organization of a small Pasdaran unit, the 'Hadid', in a training mission in Syria on the use of Libyan Scud B missiles. From that moment, the general became an integral part of the Islamic Republic's missile program and it seems that in 1986 he went to North Korea with a Pasdaran mission aimed at acquiring missile technology.
His career grows hand in hand with the development of the Iranian missile program, an obstacle course, which began with the acquisition of weapons from other countries, such as Libya and Syria, and then proceeded in the direction of domestic production, often affected by accidents or sabotage attributed to Israel. In 2005 Hajizadeh became deputy commander of the air defense of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force while in 2009, after a reorganization of the military structure, he took over the leadership of the aerospace force which develops satellite launch vehicles and technologies for ballistic missiles, including long-range ones. range.
"We can hit American warships within a radius of 2,000 km and we have maintained this radius out of respect for Europe, hoping that it will avoid disrespect towards us", declared the commander a year ago, promising to want to kill the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, for the operation he ordered which on January 3, 2020 killed the former commander of the Qods forces, Qassem Soleimani, in Iraq. A few days after that American raid, one of the units under Hajizadeh's command shot down the Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737-800 shortly after it took off from Tehran, killing 176 people. It was Hajizadeh himself who admitted that the plane had been hit by mistake, mistaking it for a hostile military vehicle, in the context of tensions after the killing of Soleimani.