Iran defies Trump by choosing Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader
The appointment signals continuity. The US president had called his candidacy ‘unacceptable’ and, hours before the announcement, warned that the new leader was ‘not going to last long’
Iran has chosen cleric Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, the late Ali Khamenei, as the country’s supreme leader, several official Iranian media outlets announced late on Sunday. The appointment of what is now the third highest-ranking figure in the 47‑year history of the Islamic Republic represents a direct challenge to U.S. President Donald Trump, who days ago called his possible selection “unacceptable.” Hours before the appointment was confirmed, the president had warned that the new Iranian leader “is not going to last long” without his approval. Israel has also threatened to eliminate “any successor” to Ali Khamenei, the 86‑year‑old head of state who was killed by the Israeli military in an airstrike in Tehran on February 28, the first day of the war.
The appointment of the late supreme leader’s second son is, above all, “a middle finger” to Trump and the United States, Iranian researcher Ali Alfoneh of the Arab Gulf States Institute (AGSI) predicted days ago on X. His selection, the expert reiterates in an email from Washington, constitutes a “clear challenge to the United States and Israel.” With him, the Islamic regime is essentially telling Trump: “If you kill one Khamenei, we will choose another,” he sums up.
Seyed Mojtaba Khamenei — Seyed being the honorific for direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad — was born in Mashhad, in eastern Iran, 56 years ago. Little is known about him, Alfoneh notes, as he “has never given interviews [...] and appears in public only twice a year: at the Revolution Day parade on February 11, and the Quds (Jerusalem) Day rally on the last Friday of Ramadan.”
Among the few things that are known about him are details such as his brief participation in the Iran–Iraq war in 1986, when at the age of 17 he joined the Habib ibn Mazahir battalion of the 27th Mohammad Rasulollah Division, linked to the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s powerful parallel army. It is also known that when his father was appointed supreme leader in 1989, he gradually became involved in the structures of power, eventually becoming a link between the supreme leader’s office, the Basij militia — which also depends on the Revolutionary Guard — and the security apparatus. He did so without becoming a figure with much visibility before the Iranian public. He has always remained in the shadows.
That image was tarnished at the end of last January, when a Bloomberg investigation linked him to a complex multimillion‑dollar network of investments and properties in Europe and the Middle East. The outlet said the financial network was funded through the sale of Iranian oil carried out in defiance of international sanctions. The country’s authorities have categorically denied the allegations.
The appointment of this cleric mirrors, in one respect, the selection of his father in 1989. When Ali Khamenei was chosen to succeed the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, he did not possess the high religious credentials required for the position. He was not a marja (a source of emulation for Shiites) and was not even an ayatollah, but held a lower clerical rank, hojatoleslam. He was soon elevated to the status of ayatollah.
The same appears to have happened with his son. Until now, he was considered to hold the rank of hojatoleslam. However, the Assembly of Experts that elected him, as well as Iranian media, already refer to him as an ayatollah, suggesting he has now been granted that higher status.
A notable difference from his father, however, is that Mojtaba Khamenei does not have any known political trajectory and has not held significant positions within Iranian institutions, beyond the behind‑the‑scenes role attributed to him. Before becoming supreme leader, Ali Khamenei had served as president of Iran from 1981 to 1989.
“He may not fully meet the constitutional requirements for the leadership as defined in Article 109 of the Constitution,” Alfoneh notes, recalling what had long been considered the main obstacle to appointing the late supreme leader’s son. That barrier was “the fact that a regime that opposes monarchy,” such as the Islamic Republic — proclaimed after the revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979 — “generally abhors hereditary leadership.” According to several Iranian regime sources, Ali Khamenei himself, while alive, ruled out his son as a successor for that very reason. The war may have helped remove that obstacle.
Other circumstances worked in Mojtaba Khamenei’s favor. The first is that last Thursday Trump called his appointment “unacceptable” and claimed a supposed right to take part in choosing Iran’s new leader. Those statements likely boosted his candidacy by turning his selection into a slap in the face to the U.S. president, one of the two leaders who have launched the war against Iran.
A “living martyr”
Another factor in his favor, Alfoneh notes, is that Israel attempted to assassinate him days ago in another airstrike. Mojtaba Khamenei survived, but was wounded. That failed assassination attempt and “the martyrdom” on February 28 of his father, his mother, his wife, his son, and his sister, among other relatives — all killed in the bombing of the supreme leader’s compound aimed at killing Ali Khamenei — give him a certain aura: that of a “living martyr,” the expert says. In Shiite tradition, this concept refers to someone who has been physically or morally wounded in an assassination attempt or in a sacred war, and who has thus demonstrated devotion to God and readiness for sacrifice.
That “symbolic capital,” Alfoneh highlights, “could be enough to mobilize roughly the 10% of the Iranian population that showed its support for the regime in the 2023 presidential elections.”
Luciano Zaccara, a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, sums up the choice of the Islamic Republic’s third supreme leader in one word: “continuity.” With Mojtaba Khamenei, he says, “nothing is going to change” in the Islamic Republic.
Hours before it was confirmed that Khamenei’s son would become the new supreme leader, several of the 88 clerics who sit on the Assembly of Experts — the body formally responsible for choosing the supreme leader’s successor upon his death — had indicated that a consensus had been reached, although they did not reveal the name.
“The vote to appoint the leader has taken place and the leader has been chosen,” said Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, an ultraconservative cleric considered close to the hardline faction of the Islamic Republic, in remarks to the Tasnim agency.
Another member of that clerical body, Mohsen Heidari, offered a hint that already pointed to Khamenei’s son, who for days had been considered the favorite to succeed his father. In a video released by Iranian state media, Heidari revealed that the candidate had been chosen based on an instruction from Ayatollah Khamenei himself: that Iran’s supreme leader should be someone “hated by the enemy.”
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