A supporter poses with a picture of Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei during a rally in central Tehran on Monday.
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Iran’s slain supreme leader will be replaced by one of his sons, Mojtaba Khamenei, a middle-ranking cleric who has so far exercised his power only behind the scenes.
Iran’s Assembly of Experts – the clerical body tasked with electing the country’s supreme leader – said on Sunday that a majority of its members had voted to appoint Khamenei as the Islamic republic’s third supreme leader since its founding in 1979.
The announcement appeared in state media a week after former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a joint US-Israeli strike. His nearly four decades of rule were marked by strong opposition to both countries and any attempts to reform or modernize Iran. Questions are raised about the future of Iran, which has responded with sustained attacks on Israel and the Gulf states.
The appointment of the younger Khamenei answers some of those questions. The 56-year-old has close ties to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), marking a continuation of his father’s hardline theocratic rule.
“(Of all the candidates out there, he was the closest to the IRGC. He had the best connections in his father’s own office,” Iran expert Afshon Ostover told NPR last week, adding that Khamenei has emerged as one of the successors. His choice “is because the regime wants to preserve the status quo as much as possible,” Ostover said.
But Khamenei is also a relative mystery. He did not hold a formal position in the government. And he rarely speaks or appears in public, except at occasional loyalist rallies.
“He’s kind of an unknown quantity,” Ostover said. “He’s the kind of guy you see in the background, in pictures, in meetings, things like that.”
But he has long been accused by analysts, including Iranian dissidents and the US government, of consolidating power and pulling strings from his father’s inner circle. Here’s what you need to know about Khamenei as he moves to the fore.
Mojtaba Khamenei is pictured in December 2016 in Tehran. He is the second son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike in late February.
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The second son of the Supreme Leader
Khamenei is the second of six children of the late leader. He was born in 1969 and grew up in the holy Shia Muslim city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, as his father was emerging as a leading anti-monarchist revolutionary figure.
After the 1979 revolution, the family moved to Tehran and the elder Khamenei held key positions in the new government, from deputy defense minister to president and finally to supreme leader in 1989.
Meanwhile, his son graduated from the elite Alavi High School before joining the Revolutionary Guard. The younger Khamenei served in the armed forces during the final years of the Iran-Iraq war (which ended in 1988), forming relationships with future key players in the Iranian security services.
Khamenei went on to pursue theology, a path that led him to the holy city of Qom to study – and to develop relationships with ultra-conservative religious clerics. He holds the clerical rank of “Hujjat al-Islam”, which is below the senior rank of “Ayatollah” (achieved only after his own father was elected supreme leader).
Khamenei further solidified his political connections with his marriage to Zahra Haddad Adel, the daughter of a prominent hardliner: Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a former parliament speaker, considered a close member of the late Supreme Leader’s inner circle. Iranian state media reported that the younger Khamenei’s wife — along with his mother, sister and brother-in-law — killed his father in a strike on February 28.
He alleged that there was influence behind the scenes
Mojtaba Khamenei is pictured at the annual Quds Day rally in Tehran in May 2019, one of the few times he has been photographed in public over the years.
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The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mojtaba Khamenei – and his father-in-law – during the first Trump administration in 2019, it said, “despite never having been elected to a government position or representing the Supreme Leader in an official capacity except for work in his father’s office”.
The US said the supreme leader had “delegated part of his leadership responsibilities to his son”.
In particular, the younger Khamenei worked closely with the commander of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij Resistance Force (a volunteer paramilitary organization dedicated to domestic security and suppression of political dissent) to advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and repressive domestic objectives.
This is not the only time Mojtaba Khamenei has been accused of quietly influencing Iranian affairs, including multiple presidential elections.
He is believed to be behind the sudden rise of hard-line former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and his re-election in a disputed 2009 election that crushed massive anti-government protests by security forces, including the Basij. One slogan of the pro-reform protesters read: “Death to Mojtaba, so you will never be the next leader!”
Former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karoubi, who contested both those elections, wrote letters to the Supreme Leader in 2005 and 2009 alleging interference by the “master’s son”. The Supreme Leader took issue with that characterization, calling Khamenei “a master himself, not a master’s son.” Karroubi was placed under house arrest in 2011 for his role in protests over the election results and held for 14 years without trial or charges.
An unsurprising but controversial choice
Khamenei’s selection is already controversial: the Israeli military warned on social media that he was a target before he was elected, while President Trump – who wants to be involved in choosing Iran’s new leader – called him “unacceptable”.
“They’re wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight,” Trump told Axios last week before announcing the decision.
Iran’s choice of defiance suggests that the road to a solution in this conflict may be long. Crude oil markets responded accordingly on Sunday, crossing $100 for the first time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Khamenei’s choice may have been unpopular at home, with Iranians taking to the streets to protest economic conditions and calling for regime change — prompting a deadly government crackdown — even before the current outbreak of fighting. It resembles a hereditary monarchy, a system of government overthrown by revolutionaries in 1979.
