Mostafa Chamran
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Mostafa Chamran (1932 – 21 June 1981) was a cabinet minister and revolutionary leader of Iran.
Born in 1932 in Tehran, he became a young student of Ayatollah Taleqani and Morteza Motahari.
In the late 1960s, he was sent to the United States for higher education, obtaining an M.S. degree from The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). He then went on to obtain his Ph.D. in Engineering - EECS in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley.
He was then hired as a senior research staff scientist at Bell Laboratories and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He was fluent in English, Arabic, French, Persian, and German.
With the Islamic Revolution taking place in Iran, Chamran's career took a sharp turn.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Chamran became politically active, and became a leading and founding member of the Islamic revolutionary movement in the Middle East, organizing and training guerrillas and revolutionary forces in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and especially southern Lebanon.
He was appointed commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), as well as Iran's Minister of Defense, personal military aide to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the latter's representative to the Supreme Council of Defense. In March 1980, he was elected into the Majlis of Iran (the Iranian Parliament) as a representative from the city of Tehran.
He was killed in combat by Iraqi troops in Khuzestan Province (a region in Southwestern Iran, bordering Iraq) on June 21, 1981 as the Iran-Iraq War was raging on.
