Mojtaba Khamenei Is Likely To Succeed His Father
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.
No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed.
His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated.
Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader.
Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Trump would have wanted.
Rubio said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion.
The choice of supreme leader is made by the 88-strong Assembly of Experts, who in this case are picking from a field of six possible candidates.
His election would be a powerful if unsurprising symbol that the government is not looking to find an accommodation with America.
Trump has said the worst-case scenario would be if Khamenei’s successor was “as bad as the previous person”.
There has been speculation for more than a decade that he would be his father’s successor, which grew when Ebrahim Raisi, the elected president and favourite of Khamenei, was killed in a helicopter crash.
Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 and studied theology after graduating from high school. At the age of 17, he went to serve in the Iran-Iraq war, but it was not until the late 1990s that he came to be recognised as a public figure in his own right.
After the landslide defeat of Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh Nuri, in the 1997 presidential election, where he won only 25% of the final vote.
Certain conservative Iranian groups realized the need to make changes to their structures and Mojtaba Khamenei was central to that project.
#mojtaba#khamenei#rubio#trump#election
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📰 Oil at $120, Futures on Fire
Global markets just got a live reminder of who actually arbitrates “order”: Brent flirts with $120, stocks slide in Asia, Europe and on Wall Street, and suddenly the Iran war isn’t “over there” — it’s in every gas receipt and rent hike on the planet. The U.S.-Israeli campaign has turned shipping lanes and pipelines into collateral, and investors aren’t panicking about democracy or human rights; they’re panicking about inflation and rates.
In Tehran, the regime answers that pressure with a raised middle finger in clerical robes. Senior ayatollahs just crowned Mojtaba Khamenei — the late leader’s son, a hard-liner wired into the Revolutionary Guards — days after Trump publicly labeled him “unacceptable” and Israel hinted it might kill the next Supreme Leader too. The message is simple: succession sold as resistance, continuity as weapon. Iranians opposed to the system shout “Death to Mojtaba” from their windows while the state doubles down on the one thing it still knows how to market: endurance under siege.
On the map, this is no longer a neat triangle of U.S.–Israel–Iran. Iranian missiles are now meeting NATO air defenses on their way toward Turkey, with debris near bases hosting U.S. forces, while Saudi and Bahraini energy facilities find themselves on the front line instead of just in communiqués. Bahrain says it can’t meet oil contracts, Saudi Arabia is intercepting drones over its capital, and Qatar’s prime minister goes on TV to call Iran’s strikes a “betrayal” even as he begs all sides to step back.
Meanwhile, the official death toll in Iran from U.S. and Israeli strikes has already passed 1,300, Iranian attacks have killed dozens more around the Gulf, and new video reinforces what investigations were already showing: an elementary school full of children was almost certainly hit by an American missile, not by Iran’s own fire — directly contradicting Trump’s version. The war planners call this “messaging.” The parents call it burying kids.
So today’s balance sheet is straightforward: a hereditary Supreme Leader promoted as defiance, a region dragged toward NATO’s red lines, markets held hostage by crude, and a U.S. president threatening “complete destruction” while insisting everything is under control. For everyone not in the war room, the choice is between paying more at the pump and paying in lives. The conflict is advertised as a show of strength, but it looks a lot more like an extremely expensive way of proving how little control anyone really has.
#iran#oil#markets#trump#israel#mojtaba#nato#gulf#war#fakeDemocracy
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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.
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.
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.
#khamenei#mojtaba#son#iran#leader#rule
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Ali Khamenei’s Second Son Took His Place
Who is He?
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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 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.
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.
#khamenei#mojtaba#son#iran#leader#rule
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