Mystery surrounds death of Hasan Irlu: Assassination or corona

Aya Ezz

In a state of mystery, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh announced on Tuesday morning, December 21, the death of Hasan Irlo, Iran’s ambassador to the Houthis in Sanaa, after being infected with the corona virus.

Irlu, a Quds Force commander, held the position of Iranian ambassador to the Houthi militia since October 2020, when Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei sent him to Sanaa as the Iranian regime’s ambassador to Yemen, and on November 27, 2020, Irlu presented his credentials to Hisham Sharaf, the Houthi foreign minister.

Irlu was born in 1959 in the city of Rey, and he is descended from a family whose men all worked in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. His mother, Sona Hazrat Gholizadeh, was called the Saber Stone after she lost two of her sons in the Iran-Iraq war. Hussein Irlu, Hasan’s younger brother, was killed in the city of Tigris, Iraq in March 1985 after he worked in the Quds Force as a commander of the destruction battalion. The second, the youngest Irlu, was killed in May 1986 on the Iraqi-Iranian border, specifically in the Al-Fakkah oil field in the Iraqi province of Maysan, according to what was reported on the Yemeni website Saba Post.

During the year in which Hasan Irlu served as ambassador, he took over the affairs of Sanaa and was in control of all events, so the Houthi militia could not do anything without obtaining permission from him, which angered the Yemenis.

Irlu caused the deaths of hundreds of Yemeni youth, as he was responsible for sending a large number of young people to Iran to undergo the most powerful military training, and then they were thrown into the first ranks of the Houthi battles against the army and coalition forces.

Taking advantage of his position, Irlu also helped to build hundreds of Shiite education and propagation centers in Yemen, in addition to being interested in the recruitment and training of girls, as he provided great financial support to the female Zeinabiyat battalion to recruit more women and girls.

Widespread controversy was sparked among Yemenis after Irlu’s death. Despite the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s statements that the cause of death was the corona virus, some Yemeni officials asserted that he was killed by an Arab coalition airstrike during his meeting with some Houthi leaders, and not as Tehran announced, according to Mareb Press.