Lawmakers backed Akhlaqi in a confidence vote on Sunday, with Iranian state television reporting 237 votes in favour out of 277 cast. He takes charge of the country's defence production and procurement apparatus — the ministry that builds and buys the weapons Iran has been racing to replace.
He replaces Majid Ebn al-Reza, who had run the ministry on an interim basis since February, when then Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh was killed by U.S.-Israeli strikes. The ministry has now had three men at the top in less than a year, and Akhlaqi arrives with a clear brief: rebuild what the strikes destroyed.
Akhlaqi has spent decades inside Iran's defence industry and held senior roles in its aerospace and missile sectors — work that put him under both U.S. and EU sanctions. In the programme he presented to lawmakers, he pledged to rebuild the country's military-industrial infrastructure, speed up the development of defence technologies and expand cooperation with private-sector companies.
"The US President should focus on ensuring his forces are withdrawn safely from our region. If he drops a single bomb, he will have to see how many of his troops end up being carried out of the region in a horizontal position." — Mehrdad Akhlaqi Ketabchi
The warning was aimed at reporting out of Washington this week. CNN reported that the U.S. has developed strike plans that could include using the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb — the "mother of all bombs," the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal — against Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear sites if President Donald Trump orders renewed combat operations. Akhlaqi said Tehran has taken the necessary measures to counter any use of the weapon against Iran.
His appointment hardens the picture on both sides: Washington keeps its strike plans on the table, and Tehran has answered by putting a sanctioned missile man, rather than a caretaker, in charge of rebuilding its arsenal.
"If the American enemy makes another miscalculation, the response of the valiant Iranian people and the fighters of Islam will be surprising and extensive," he said.
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