Military Man and North Korean PhD Holder Takes Charge of Crisis Management

Iranwire – President Ebrahim Raisi and cabinet have appointed Mohammad Hassan Nami as the new head of Iran’s Crisis Management Organization. A Brigadier General and former senior advisor to the Iranian military, Nami will replace Esmail Najjar, who has led the organization since March 2014.  

Nami briefly served as Minister of Communications under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013. He has held down various other senior posts including deputy chief of staff of the Armed Forces, head of the army’s Geographical Organization, deputy defense minister and the Iranian embassy’s military attaché in Pyongyang, North Korea.

He was dispatched to North Korea at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s, and went on to gain a PhD in state administration from Kim Il Sung University. In 2017 he went on the record to stress that there had been no exchange of nuclear or missile technology between the two countries at any time.

Despite his background in the Geography Organization, Nami has expressed some off-the-wall views on the earth’s geology. Speaking at Iran’s third National Festival of Communications and ICT, he said the government planned to create an in-house, “Islamic” version of Google Earth. He then added: “There are two layers in the earth; they have discovered that one of the layers is the best means of transmitting data, audio and video. When Imam-e Zaman [the “Lord of the Ages” in Shia mythology] re-appears, his sound and image will be transmitted to the whole planet, through this layer.”