Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi lost his life after the helicopter he and other officials were riding in crashed during bad weather in a mountainous and forested region of the nation.

The 63-year-old, who served as a representative of hardline and conservative political groups in Iran for almost three years, looked set to seek reelection the next year.

As a possible replacement for Iran's 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Raisi was once the chief justice.

Raisi was born in Mashhad, a centre of Shia Islam in northern Iran. He received religious instruction and training at the Qom seminary, where he studied under eminent academics like Khamenei.

He donned a black turban, just like the supreme leader, signifying that he was a sayyid, or a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad. Twelver Shia Muslims place special importance on this rank.

Before moving to Tehran in 1985, Raisi gained expertise as a prosecutor in a number of different jurisdictions. Human rights organisations claim that he was a member of a committee of judges in the capital city that oversaw the execution of political detainees.

The late president had a lengthy tenure on the Assembly of Experts, which selects the supreme leader's successor in the case of the latter's demise.

2014 saw him nominated by Khamenei to head the Astan Quds Razavi, which resulted in his two-year tenure as attorney general. With billions of dollars in assets, the enormous bonyad, or charitable trust, is in charge of looking after the shrine of the eighth Shia imam, Imam Reza.

In an attempt to unseat former president Hassan Rouhani, who stood for the centrist and moderate groups, Raisi first ran for president in 2017.

Appointed by Khamenei in 2019, Raisi was making headlines as the new head of the Iranian judiciary after a brief break. He campaigned on the platform of fighting corruption and defending justice, and he travelled across the provinces a lot to win over the populace.

In the midst of poor voter attendance and the widespread disqualification of moderate and reformist contenders, Raisi was elected president in 2021 and seemed to have established a solid platform for reelection.

Like other senior Iranian leaders, he kept his most caustic remarks for the United States and Israel, and then for their Western friends.

Since the beginning of the Gaza War in October, Raisi has made numerous statements denouncing the "genocide" and "massacres" that Israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people, and she has urged the international community to step in.

Following Israel's destruction of Tehran's Syrian consulate and the deaths of seven IRGC members, including two generals, he vowed to exact retribution on the country.

He also applauded Iran's response, which involved firing hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. The majority of these were shot down by an alliance of Israeli partners, but Iran nevertheless declared the operation a success.

Regarding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran's 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, Raisi was hardline. The JCPOA has been in limbo since former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018.

He supported Khamenei's adoption of the "resistance" and "resilience" strategic policies in the face of the most severe sanctions Iran has ever experienced, which were put in place after the nuclear deal collapsed.

The late president was a close ally of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a fervent supporter of the political and armed "axis of resistance" that Iran backs throughout the region, especially in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

In addition, he was a fervent supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Iran has backed in his government's bloody conflict with the country's opposition.