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iranwire – When Ali Shamkhani responded to criticism over his daughter’s lavish wedding, he didn’t address his fellow Iranians in Persian.
The senior Iranian security official instead posted in Hebrew, quoting the 1973 prison escape film Papillon, saying “You bastards, I’m still alive [here].”
The Papillon quote he chose carries its own irony. In the film, Steve McQueen’s character survives imprisonment and escapes to freedom by refusing to surrender despite brutal conditions. Shamkhani apparently identified with that defiance.
But for many Iranians, the more fitting comparison is not to a prisoner refusing to break under pressure or torture: it is to the jailers and guards who carry out acts of oppression while exempting themselves and their families from the same rules they enforce on the rest of their society.
The message, delivered in the language of the Islamic Republic’s sworn enemy, captured something beyond a minor local controversy.
For Iranians struggling with inflation, unemployment, and international sanctions, it widened the growing chasm between Iran’s revolutionary rhetoric and the affluent and aristocratic lifestyle of its elite.
The video that sparked the controversy showed scenes from a wedding ceremony held in March 2024 at Tehran’s upscale Espinas Palace Hotel. Under the laws of the Islamic Republic, given the type of wedding he hosted, Shamkhani had committed a crime punishable by up to 99 lashes.
Women danced without headscarves in mixed company at the wedding, where luxury dominated every frame. The estimated cost ran into billions of tomans, all for the daughter of a man who had spent decades enforcing the same Islamic codes that guests flouted at his family celebration.
The video’s release came amid reports that Iran plans to introduce 80,000 new morality police officers to Tehran’s streets to enforce women’s compliance with Islamic dress codes.
Shamkhani, 70, currently serves as a political adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and sits on the Expediency Discernment Council, one of Iran’s most powerful bodies.
His career spans four decades at the pinnacle of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus, from minister of defense under reformist President Mohammad Khatami to secretary of the Supreme National Security Council during the country’s most turbulent recent years.
But the wedding video exposes more than personal hypocrisy: reaction to it has become a symbol of public anger toward a ruling class that preaches sacrifice while growing rich, demanding piety while enjoying Western luxuries, and calling for resistance even as it profits from the sanctions meant to punish the regime.
Shamkhani’s most grievous actions may have been during the November 2019 protests. When the government suddenly announced dramatic fuel price increases, demonstrations erupted nationwide. As secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Shamkhani managed the crisis response.
The government shut down nationwide internet access, deployed security forces in overwhelming numbers, and cracked down with lethal force.
Estimates of casualties vary widely, with human rights organizations claiming that security forces killed hundreds of people.
Former parliament member Mahmoud Sadeghi later recounted a conversation with Shamkhani during the protests.
According to Sadeghi, when he told the security chief that people were being killed in the streets and asked what would happen if protesters refused to go home, Shamkhani replied, “We will attack them with whatever it takes.”
Sadeghi also added that 85 per cent of casualties either were not present at protests or were killed in gunfire from unlicensed weapons, raising questions about the official narrative.
Days after the crackdown, Shamkhani claimed in December 2019 that enemies of the Islamic Republic were killing civilians, but framing the Iranian government for the actions, in an apparent attempt to blame the deaths of protectors on foreign-backed agents rather than security forces.
Later, Shamkhani acknowledged that “the damage of the November 2019 [protests] was preventable” and criticized the sudden implementation of the fuel price increase.
But he deflected responsibility, implicitly blaming President Hassan Rouhani’s Ministry of Interior for mismanaging the situation.
The Supreme Leader eventually asked Shamkhani to console victims’ families, for which he traveled to affected areas, including the oil-rich city of Mahshahr. The assignment did little to repair his reputation among grieving relatives.
Two months after the protests, in January 2020, Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard.
The Iranian authorities initially denied responsibility for the crash, suggesting mechanical failure was to blame. Still, days later and under mounting international pressure and evidence, Iran admitted that Revolutionary Guard forces had “mistakenly” shot down the civilian aircraft with surface-to-air missiles, believing it to be a hostile target amid heightened tensions following the U.S. assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.
Shamkhani recently claimed in an interview that he informed President Rouhani from the first moments that “friendly fire” had brought the plane down.
The statement contradicted the Rouhani government’s official narrative and timeline, leading associates of the former president to accuse Shamkhani of trying to undermine the president politically.
Some observers suggest the timing of the wedding video’s becoming public was not coincidental. The video surfaced shortly after Shamkhani’s interview about the plane crash. Speculation has swirled about whether someone close to Rouhani leaked the footage in retaliation.
Shamkhani was born in Ahvaz, capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he helped establish Mansourun, an armed group that later participated in forming the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Shamkhani gained prominence after writing a letter titled “Come to Our Aid,” which he later described as protesting the mismanagement of the war effort.
He rose through the ranks to become deputy commander of the IRGC, simultaneously commanding the IRGC Ground Forces and serving as deputy for intelligence and operations.
His ideological fervor during those years was unambiguous. He called the Persian Gulf the “Gulf of Islam” and committed himself to the “elimination of Israel.”
In 2016, after the 2003 Iraq War created a power vacuum that the Islamic Republic filled in part with Shia proxies in Iraq, Shankhani said, “Today we have no doubt that the phrase ‘The road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala’ is the right priority, and today Karbala [in Iraq] is in our hands,” suggesting Jerusalem would follow.
Such revolutionary declarations now sit uncomfortably beside the images of his daughter’s wedding, where members of his own family disregarded the same Islamic values and dress codes he has promoted for decades.
But even as Shamkhani preached resistance and revolutionary values, allegations of family corruption mounted. His son, Hossein Shamkhani, has been sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union.
Hossein ran a company called Admiral, ostensibly outside government structures. In practice, according to Western intelligence assessments, it was a hub for covert oil trade between Iran and Russia, helping Tehran evade sanctions. Shamkhani has attacked his critics as a “fifth column” and promised to reveal “untold stories” in the future.
One such “untold” story could be how Shamkhani was able to send Hossein to the American University of Beirut, where annual tuition is tens of thousands of dollars, and how two nephews – Mowoud and Mohammad Hadi Shamkhani – secured positions at Iran’s embassy in Russia and the Arvand Free Zone.
The pattern was clear to critics: sanctions and economic hardship became profit opportunities for those with the right connections, even as ordinary Iranians struggled with inflation sometimes exceeding 40 per cent.
Iranian media began referring to “sanctions profiteers” when discussing the Shamkhani family, adding that the very economic warfare meant to pressure Iran’s government has instead enriched its elite.
As secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Shamkhani championed what Iran called “active resistance,” a strategy of deepening ties with China and Russia to offset Western pressure.
He called the 25-year strategic cooperation agreement with China, signed in 2021, part of this active resistance policy and said Iran’s cooperation should cause the United States to be “worried.”
The policy represented a “look to the East” strategy to neutralize sanctions through alternative economic partnerships.
When the wedding video initially leaked, several people, including conservative commentator Ali Akbar Raefipour and parliament members, criticized it, questioning the cost, the choice of luxury venues, and the obvious signs of excess.
They asked how such blatant violations of hijab requirements and gender segregation rules could happen at an event connected to a senior official who had spent his career enforcing those regulations. The response also revealed Iran’s political fault lines.
Both conservatives and government-aligned reformists rushed to defend Shamkhani, calling the leak a “privacy violation” and “media assassination.”
The newspaper Etemad framed it as a continuation of an actual assassination attempt after Shamkhani survived an Israeli attack in June and an adviser to the Speaker of the Parliament Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf said it was an attempt to tar the reputations of key officials in Iran’s conflict with Israel.
But even sympathetic outlets acknowledged the damage. Daneshju news agency, while condemning the privacy violation, admitted the contradiction between officials’ lifestyles and official slogans had “severely affected” society. Fars News Agency called it evidence of a collapse in public trust.
Nour News, closely aligned with Shamkhani, called it “psychological warfare” against Iran, while praising political factions for defending privacy rights.
Mahdiyeh Shadmani, daughter of former IRGC commander Ali Shadmani, went furthest, calling the video release part of a “Mossad project” aimed at character assassination.
For ordinary Iranians watching these defenses, the message was clear: rules apply differently depending on status and connections.
The Islamic Republic has long demanded that citizens accept economic hardship as the price of resistance against foreign pressure.
Women face arrest for improper hijab. Young people endure unemployment. Families struggle as the rial collapses against foreign currencies.
Meanwhile, officials’ children study abroad, family businesses profit from sanction evasion schemes, and weddings cost more than most Iranians earn in a lifetime.
