Mojtaba Khamenei has been named as Iran’s new supreme leader just over a week after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes.
A statement from the Assembly of Experts — the panel of Shia clerics responsible under Iranian law for choosing the country’s top leader — said Mojtaba Khamenei had been selected as the third leader of the Islamic Republic, according to reports from IRIB state TV and the Fars, Tasnim and ISNA news agencies.
President Donald Trump told Axios last week that the choice would be “unacceptable” and suggested he wanted to handpick a new supreme leader, a process usually overseen by Iran’s clerics.
“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment,” he said. “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me.”
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Trump repeated the sentiment in an ABC News interview, saying the new leader “is not going to last long” if Iranian leaders do not get his approval.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday about the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader.
The Israel Defense Forces warned Sunday that any successor to Ali Khamenei would be considered a target.
The semiofficial Mehr News Agency confirmed last week that Khamenei’s son was alive and well after the deadly strikes launched by the U.S. and Israel that killed his father, his wife and other family members.
Mehr reported that Mojtaba Khamenei was “overseeing matters related to the martyrs of the family, managing affairs, and providing consultation and review on important national issues.”
Mojtaba Khamenei, a politician and cleric, is known to hold significant influence among the administrators and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But he is not particularly popular in Iran, with father-to-son succession also being frowned upon in the country, particularly the U.S.-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was toppled in 1979.
He also lacks the religious credentials of his father to lead a clerical regime, which claims to represent God’s will on Earth.
“Most Iranians had been hoping for a transition to a system of governance not led by an Islamic cleric, but rather by a president and a council of ministers, preceded, of course, by, you know, a referendum,” Valentine Moghadam, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Northeastern University in Boston, said before the appointment.
“But that seems to have been made impossible because of the recent assault by Israel and the United States,” she said.
Questions around who will succeed Khamenei have been complicated by the death of Iran’s then-president, Ebrahim Raisi, long thought of as a possible successor, in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
But the regime will be eager to show Israel, the U.S. and the Iranian people that it isn’t collapsing, Javed Ali, a former senior counterterrorism official and now an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said before the appointment.
“By picking the next supreme leader, that obviously is a signal,” he said.
Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at the U.K. think tank Chatham House, said before the appointment that “the signal that such a nomination will give is that nothing will change.”
Despite what little support there might be for Iran’s new supreme leader, without regime change in Iran, leaders would presumably maintain the same “iron grip on control through the institutions of power,” Ali said.
“The next supreme leader will step into that same system,” he added.
The Assembly of Experts last convened to select a new leader in 1989, when it chose Ali Khamenei. The new leader is required to be a man and an Islamic cleric under Iranian law.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment makes him an immediate target, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warning Wednesday that any new leader would become “an unequivocal target for elimination.”
He emphasized that Israel and the U.S. would work together “to crush the regime’s capabilities and create conditions for the Iranian people to overthrow and replace it.”
