Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader

Original article by Lorenzo Tondo

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor, as the war enters its 10th day and fresh missile and drone strikes reverberate across the Middle East.

After members of the clerical body responsible for selecting Iran’s highest authority announced the decision on Sunday, Iranian institutions and politicians, from the foreign ministry to lawmakers, issued statements expressing their allegiance. “We will obey the commander-in-chief until the last drop of our blood,” a statement from the defence council said.

The move could lead to a further escalation of the war, given Donald Trump had already acknowledged that Mojtaba Khamenei was the most likely successor and made clear he considered him an “unacceptable” choice. The US president said earlier on Sunday that Iran’s next supreme leader was “not going to last long” if Tehran did not get his approval first.

When asked about the appointment during an interview with the Times of Israel published late on Sunday, Trump was reported as saying: “We’ll see what happens.”

In the same interview, Trump said a decision on when to end the war would be a “mutual” one, together with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump also asserted that Iran would have destroyed Israel if he and Netanyahu had not been around. “Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it … We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel,” he was quoted as saying.

The Israeli military said it had launched a wave of strikes on Monday targeting “regime infrastructure” in central Iran, the first such announcement since the appointment of the new supreme leader. The military also announced strikes on the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran and its proxies appeared to have launched attacks, too, with rocket and drone strikes targeting a US diplomatic facility near Baghdad’s international airport that were intercepted by the C-RAM defence system, said police sources.

A drone strike targeted a US military base near Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan, security sources said, while Saudi authorities reported intercepting a drone east of its northern al-Jawf region.

In Bahrain, the health ministry reported 32 people were wounded overnight by an Iranian drone attack on the island of Sitra. They include a 17-year-old girl who suffered severe head and eye injuries, and a two-month-old baby, according to the ministry.

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Iranian state media also showed a projectile said to have been launched at Israel bearing the slogan: “At your command, Sayyid Mojtaba,” using an Islamic honorific.

The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei was welcomed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who are backed by the Iranian regime. “We congratulate the Islamic Republic of Iran, its leadership and people, on the selection of Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution at this important and pivotal juncture,” the group said in a statement on Telegram.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation marks the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution that Iran’s supreme leadership has passed from father to son. It is a development likely to ignite debate inside Iran about the emergence of a dynastic system in a state founded explicitly to overthrow hereditary rule after the shah.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled for 37 years, was killed in a US-Israeli strike on Tehran on 28 February, on the first day of the war with Iran.

Across Iran’s political and security establishment, officials moved swiftly to welcome the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader.

Khamenei would lead the country under the current sensitive conditions, the top Iranian security official Ali Larijani said, calling for unity around the new leader.

State media reported the leadership of Iran’s armed forces pledged allegiance to him, while the speaker of parliament hailed the decision and described following Khamenei as a “religious and national duty”.

The Revolutionary Guards declared they stood ready to follow him, signalling broad backing from the country’s core institutions.

Earlier in the day, in a post on X in Farsi, the Israeli military said it would continue pursuing every successor of Ali Khamenei and would pursue every person who sought to appoint a successor for him.

For many analysts, Khamenei’s appointment is a symbolic move designed to make the regime still appear strong and determined not to bow to western pressure.

The 56-year-old cleric has never held elected office nor formally occupied a senior position within Iran’s government. He has spent much of his life at the centre of power in Iran while remaining largely out of public view.

Born in 1969 in the north-eastern city of Mashhad, Khamenei was raised within the political and clerical world that emerged after the 1979 revolution. As a young man he studied theology in the seminaries of Qom and reportedly took part in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war.

Unlike many figures in Iran’s leadership, Khamenei never pursued elected office or a prominent government role. Instead, he gradually became an influential presence inside his father’s office, where he was widely seen as part of a small circle managing political access to the supreme leader.

Over the years he cultivated close relationships with conservative clerics and elements of the Revolutionary Guards, a connection analysts say strengthened his standing within the system.

His name surfaced publicly during the disputed 2009 presidential election, when reformist figures accused him of playing a role in supporting the security crackdown that followed mass protests. But he has never discussed the issue of succession publicly.

To his supporters, Khamenei represents continuity with the ideological line established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and maintained by his father. To critics, his rise raises uncomfortable questions about the concentration of power – and the possibility of hereditary leadership in a state founded in revolt against monarchy.

Oil prices surged more than 25% on Monday to their highest levels since mid-2022, as major Middle Eastern oil producers cut supply because they cannot safely send shipments through the strait of Hormuz to refiners worldwide. Traffic through the strait was largely closed after Iran attacked at least five ships, with a limited number of tankers transiting, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply.