Mojtaba Khamenei and his children on Quds Day in 2018. (Tasnim News Agency)
Iran’s Assembly of Experts has named Mojtaba Khamenei to replace his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the country’s new supreme leader, state media reported early on March 9.
Mojtaba, Ali’s second-eldest son, was born in 1969. As a child, he witnessed both the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the previous dynasty, and his father’s rise to power, first as president in 1981, then as supreme leader in 1989.
A cleric, Mojtaba studied under the late Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi. He also joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, serving during the Iran-Iraq War in the Habib Battalion.
Mojtaba has been named in recent days as the frontrunner to succeed his father, who was killed on February 28, the first day of United States-Israeli strikes on Iran.
U.S. President Donald Trump has called the younger Khamenei “unacceptable” and demanded to have input in choosing Iran’s next supreme leader. On March 8, he said whoever was chosen to replace the late supreme leader would not “last long” without his approval.
“He’s going to have to get approval from us,” Trump told ABC News. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”
“I don’t want people to have to go back in five years and have to do the same thing again, or worse let them have a nuclear weapon,” he added.
The Israeli military also issued a direct threat, saying that it will continue pursuing every successor of Iran’s slain supreme leader.
“After neutralizing the tyrant Khamenei, the terrorist regime of Iran is attempting to rebuild itself and select a new leader,” the IDF said in a post on X in Persian on March 8.
“Iran’s Assembly of Experts, which has not convened for decades, will soon gather in the city of Qom. We want to tell you that the hand of the State of Israel will continue to pursue every successor and every person who seeks to appoint a successor,” warns the military. “We warn all those who intend to participate in the successor selection meeting that we will not hesitate to target you either.”
Mojtaba is expected to be more hardline than his father, thus, the war will likely go on under his command. His selection comes as a blow to both the U.S. and Israel who repeatedly claimed that the ongoing war had weakened the government of the Islamic Republic.
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that weakling won’t even last a week.
nena that is not the point. they think differently compared to westerners. they are sacrificing themselves. the world tyrant orange man is absolutely disgustingly arrogant. iran ideology is anti tyrant. westerners cannot understand that since they purged their own population from people able to resist tyranny for decades. they think only others are brainwashed; that is the efficiency of soft power.
stupid cowardly persians. only 30,000 arabs kick the sheet out of 150,000 persian sasanian empire forces in the battle nahavand and turned them into the useless islamic towelhead automatons that they now are.
bla,bla,bla of an inpotent.
unlike westerners and you who said you were going to sleep in your basement out of fear the muslims want to die and go to heaven.
when a irgc ballistic missile armed with a cluster warhead reaches a usn cvn, that cvn is going back to the nearest friendly port with a flight deck peppered with holes and an airwing that is non functional and out of action for months if not years.
long live persia
fuck america israel and the j e w s
iran is fighting for all humanity against the forces of evil.
but, but, how is that possible??!!!?!!!!,ha, ha, ha
filhos da puta, se eliminais um comentário, também tendes que eliminar o but, but, tais fodidos porque nunca mais ides dormir em paz.
censorship censorship censorship sf censorship queens going into overdrive.
russian jews. lets return to motherland, russia.
you can’t do this daddy don was gonna pick
cada vez estais mais estúpidos.
he will be dead soon…heheheh
you are going to kill trump?