Ibrahim Yazdi and His Role in Iranian Foreign Policy 1979

Abstract

      Ibrahim Yazdi was born in 1931 in Iran’s northern city of Qazvin. He studied at the University of Tehran. After the anti-Mosadagh coup in 1953, Yazdi joined the secret Iranian national resistance movement (1953-1960), which opposed the Shah regime. In the early 1960s, Yazdi travelled to the United States for study and political opposition, where he founded the Iran Freedom Movement abroad with a number of his companions, including Ali Shariati, Mustafa Chamran and Sadeq Qutbzadeh. In 1963, Yazdi traveled to Egypt where he founded a military organization called (Sama). However, in 1966, Yazdi moved the organization’s military headquarters to Beirut, and in 1967 Yazdi joined Baylor University and obtained a doctorate in biochemistry.

   In 1975, Yazdi was court-marshalled for ten-year absentia, which made it impossible for him to return to his country. He remained in the United States until 1977 and obtained American citizenship. When Ayatollah Khomeini moved from Iraq to Paris in 1978, Yazdi acted as an advisor and spokesperson. He became deputy prime minister and then foreign minister in the Mehdi Bazargan-headed transitional government until December 6, 1979. He suggested a once-year Quds Day in 1979. When the Tehran-based American embassy was stormed on December 4, 1979 by angry crowds, Yazdi represented Khomeini in that attack. From 1995 to 2017, he chaired the Iran Freedom Movement. Due to an incurable pancreatic cancer, Yazdi, at the age of eighty-five, died on August 27, 2017 in an Izmir hospital.