Not Martyrs, Just Corpses: The Sudden Death of Iran’s Top Generals

By Ukes Baha | 14 June 2025

Bagheri and Salami are gone. Not sanctified. Not eternal. Just dead.

They ruled with prisons, missiles, and fear. They lived as bullies — silencing voices, branding dissent as treason, turning their own people into enemies, and exporting intimidation beyond Iran’s borders. Power was their language; punishment, their answer.

Then, as suddenly as the strikes they once ordered, power spoke back. Major General Mohammad Bagheri and Major General Hossein Salami — two of the regime’s highest-ranking enforcers — were assassinated in precision hits. Not in a war of ideals. Not on a battlefield of courage. In the same manner they dealt to others: swift, targeted, merciless.

They lived as bullies, and in the end, they died at the hands of a bigger bully. The same violence they unleashed on others returned to them without warning. No speeches, no defence, no escape — just sudden fire and silence.

The regime now scrambles to polish coffins with titles — “martyr,” “hero,” “guardian” — to whitewash failure and mask weakness. But no label changes the truth. These men were not sanctified in death. They were struck down and erased, leaving nothing behind but corpses and crimes.

No martyrdom. No redemption. Only coffins — heavy with the weight of guilt, not glory.

From Commanders to Corpses

Hossein Salami, head of the Revolutionary Guards, built his career on slogans, missiles, and fear. He presided over foreign proxy wars, mass arrests at home, and the silencing of dissent. He was in command when Flight PS752 was destroyed — 176 innocent lives erased in seconds. Students, families, children. Not soldiers. Not enemies. Just ordinary people whose deaths were hidden behind excuses and silence. That stain never left him.

Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces, was the strategist of repression. He engineered the networks of surveillance and control that turned against Iranians themselves. After Mahsa Amini’s killing ignited nationwide protests, it was Bagheri who oversaw the crushing response: live rounds into crowds, prisons filled to the brim, families hunted for speaking out. He wasn’t protecting a nation — he was defending a regime built on fear.

They were not leaders. They were enforcers. Their names do not echo with honour, only with terror. And now, stripped of life, they linger only as reminders of cruelty. Whatever power they had is buried with them, and no regime ceremony can raise it back from the grave.

The Lie of Martyrdom

The regime drapes them in flags, stages funerals, and repeats the word “martyr” as if a chant can rewrite reality. But no ritual, no title, no speech changes the fact: they died in sudden fire, unprepared, cut down by the very violence they once directed at others.

A martyr dies for a cause greater than himself — for freedom, justice, or belief. These men died for nothing greater than power. They were not defending a people or a principle; they were defending their own rank. And in the instant they fell, even that was stripped away.

The regime clings to martyrdom because without it, there is only humiliation: two of its most powerful figures reduced to silence, their coffins paraded as symbols of strength when in truth they are evidence of weakness. Martyrs inspire the living. These men leave only fear, anger, and relief that they can no longer command.

Beyond Iran’s Borders

Their deaths were not only an internal shock but a regional signal. Israel’s strikes showed the world that even the highest ranks of the IRGC could be reached. What Tehran claimed as invincibility was shattered in seconds.

For Iranians in exile, it was a moment of bitter vindication — proof that those who commanded fear at home were not immune abroad. For neighbouring states, it was a reminder that the regime’s power rests on men who can be erased as swiftly as they rise. The regime calls it martyrdom. The world sees it for what it is: vulnerability exposed.

The System Behind Them

The 1979 revolution was sold as liberation — a promise of freedom, justice, and dignity. What it delivered was a new tyranny dressed in turbans instead of crowns. The Shah’s palace was replaced with clerics’ prisons. The slogans of faith became weapons of control. What was meant to free a nation became the machinery that enslaved it.

Khomeini promised free houses for the people and fairness for the oppressed. What he gave were firing squads, purges, and indoctrination. Students, workers, women, and minorities who had carried the revolution on their backs were silenced, jailed, or executed once their purpose was served. Betrayal was built into the foundation of the new state.

The generals did not create this system — but they were its guardians. Bagheri and Salami enforced its rules with loyalty and cruelty. They were not thinkers or visionaries; they were instruments, keeping its lies alive with missiles, prisons, and fear. And only death, sudden and final, made their silence permanent.

No Honour in the End

They lived by fear, and they died by fear. Men who filled prisons, who ordered missiles, who silenced voices with bullets — in the end met the same silence themselves. No speeches to inspire. No final defiance. No heroic end. Just fire from above, sudden and merciless, leaving nothing but wreckage and ash.

This is the irony of their power: they believed themselves untouchable, yet their end was ordinary in its brutality. The same fate they dealt to others came for them, without warning, without ceremony, without honour. They left this world not as generals in command but as targets destroyed.

For the people of Iran, their deaths brought no mourning. Only a bitter kind of relief. One less fist striking down dissent. One less shadow looming over the streets. The machine of oppression still stands, but weaker now — a little more hollow, a little more afraid.

The Regime Remains

The regime still stands — but only by force and fear. It clings to censorship to silence truth, inflation crushes its own people, and surveillance has replaced trust with suspicion. A government that promised dignity now survives only by watching, punishing, and choking the very nation it claims to protect.

Yet its generals are not eternal. Its enforcers are not untouchable. Coffins wrapped in flags cannot hide defeat. Titles like “martyr” cannot disguise corpses. The myth of invincibility dies each time one of its strongest men falls. And though the machine still grinds on, it does so with fewer gears, more cracks, and growing fear inside its own walls.

The People’s Reality

When the news broke, the government did not rush to glorify them. There were no immediate grand funerals, no instant outpouring of official triumph. Instead, there was hesitation — silence first, then carefully managed statements. Even the regime seemed uncertain how to dress defeat as victory.

Among ordinary Iranians, the silence meant something else: confirmation that the state felt the weight of humiliation. In living rooms, on whispered calls, and across the diaspora, the response was relief, not grief. These men were not remembered as heroes but as architects of pain, and their sudden absence was felt only as one less shadow.

Meanwhile, families still bury their own sons and daughters — killed in protests, lost to poverty, or forced into exile. Every delay, every muted ceremony, only deepens the gap between the regime’s staged theatre and the people’s truth. What the state fears to say out loud, the people already know: no title, no banner, no silence can turn these corpses into martyrs.

Personal Truth

I am Persian, now living in New Zealand. My father once served as a general in Tehran’s Air Force — before the revolution devoured its own and the regime tore our lives apart. Like millions of Iranians, my family was scattered across the world, silenced in our homeland, and forced into exile that was never a choice but a necessity.

This is not vengeance. It is memory. It is testimony. It is the truth that no tyrant, no general, and no regime escapes accountability forever — even if justice arrives late, even if it arrives in unexpected ways. Their power ended in seconds. Their fear continues in death. And history will not absolve them.

What History Will Remember

No title survives the grave. Not “General,” not “Commander,” not “Martyr.” They all dissolve into dust.

No slogan shields a coffin. Chants and flags cannot hide the silence of death, or the crimes that brought it.

No regime, however brutal, outlives the truth that exposes it. Lies collapse, power rots, and tyrants are remembered not for glory — but for the fear they spread and the suffering they caused.

That is what history keeps. That is what remains.

Every tyrant dies. Every enforcer falls. And every truth, once spoken, outlives the lies of power.

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