Esmail Qaani has spent the past two years accumulating a reputation for his extraordinary ability to walk away alive while everyone around him dies.
But now that Iran is at war with the US and Israel, his fate is, once again, the subject of intense speculation, with unverified claims circulating online that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have detained or even executed the Quds Force commander on suspicion of spying for Israel.
"Esmail Qaani, head of Iran’s Quds Force has been executed by IRGC. He has survived all assassination attempts so far & was even with Khamenei during US-ISRAEL bombing but escaped. Earlier, he was taken into custody by the IRGC on suspicion of being a Mossad agent," wrote one X account.
The same claim appeared in other accounts.
Mr Qaani, 67, took command of the IRGC's Quds Force in January 2020 after the US assassination of his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani, in Baghdad. The Quds Force is Iran's elite foreign operations arm, the unit that built, armed and co-ordinated the "Axis of Resistance" across the Middle East.
During his tenure, that axis has been shattered. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is dead. Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh has been assassinated. Dozens of senior Iranian commanders have been eliminated. Most recently, on Saturday, a joint US-Israeli operation killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several senior figures from Iran's security establishment.
Mr Qaani, the commander directly responsible for managing the regional proxy network during a regional war, wasn't mentioned to be among those killed.
The pattern of his survival has driven suspicion as several reports, relying on unnamed security sources, suggested over the past two years that he was reportedly close to attending several of the strikes that killed Iran's most senior figures.
During the 12-day Iran-Israel war, he was declared dead by multiple outlets before reappearing at a public celebration in Tehran in late June 2025, wearing civilian clothes and a baseball cap, in apparent good health. The same sequence played out in October 2024, when he was declared dead, but then reportedly interrogated, and then resurfaced on state television.
Away from social media, and following Israel's devastating penetration of Hezbollah, which allowed it to systematically eliminate the group's leadership, Iran launched a formal security breach investigation. Unnamed sources across the region told regional outlets that Mr Qaani and his team were placed under isolation and interrogation.
Israel had published a list of Iranian and Iran-linked officials it wanted eliminated. Last weekend, that list was declared "complete". Mr Qaani's name was not on it.
