Iranian President dead in Crash: Now comes the Night of Long Knives

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - Iran's Mehr News Service reported Monday morning Tehran time that President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian died Sunday in a helicopter crash in a remote area of Iran. They had been at the border with the neighboring country of Azerbaijan to inaugurate a dam and were going to Tabriz when the crash occurred because of bad weather. Iran has two provinces also named Azerbaijan. The region was bifurcated in the early nineteenth century when the Russian Empire conquered half of Iran's Azerbaijan and made it a Russian colony that became independent in 1991.