Who is Ghalibaf? Iran's hard-line speaker rises as Trump talks peace

The Israeli military has systematically killed Iran’s top leaders, so when President Donald Trump said this week that talks are being held with Iran, the biggest question was: Who exactly is the U.S. talking to

The Israeli military has systematically killed Iran’s top leaders, so when President Donald Trump said this week that talks are being held with Iran, the biggest question was: Who exactly is the U.S. talking to?

That figure could be Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the hard-line speaker of parliament who has deep ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful military, political and economic force in the country.

Ghalibaf, 64, one of Iran's leading conservative figures, is a former commander who has held top political posts for more than 20 years. Known as a pragmatic hard-liner, he is the type of respected figure among regime loyalists who could be an effective point man in talks with the U.S., said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a Washington think tank.

“Ghalibaf exhibits a dual posture — pragmatic when engaging pragmatic counterparts and hard-line when confronting hard-line adversaries,” Alfoneh said. “However, given the regime’s current extreme circumstances, a generally more hard-line stance should not be surprising.”

Ghalibaf was born in 1961 in the small town of Torqabeh in northeast Iran. His father was a shopkeeper, and the family was not wealthy, Ghalibaf wrote in a lengthy autobiography on his official website.