Iran’s new Supreme Leader (Rahbar) has been officially named Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike at the start of the US-Israel-Iran war on February 28.
Mojtaba Khamenei has long been seen as one of his father’s potential successors. For this reason, he became the target of American and Israeli strikes – and as a result of these strikes, he was injured.
The Supreme Leader of Iran is elected by a special body – the Assembly of Experts. On March 3, the council building in Qom (the spiritual capital of the Islamic Republic) was subjected to an aerial bombardment, but according to official Iranian media, the meeting participants themselves were unharmed.
It seems that the election of a new leader took place several days ago, but the spiritual authorities were in no hurry to announce this officially, in the hope of ensuring the safety of the monks. His whereabouts and what condition he is in after his injury are unknown.
Mojtaba Khamenei is 56 years old. He does not have the title of Ayatollah. He is not a mujtahid, which means he does not have the formal qualifications to independently interpret the principles of Islamic law. He teaches in a school (school), but does not head his own school. The main measure of spiritual authority among Muslim clergy is the number of believers who voluntarily declared their intention to follow his rule. From this point of view, Mojtaba Khamenei has practically no spiritual authority.
The election of Mojtaba Khamenei, even if it does not contradict the letter of the Iranian Constitution, clearly contradicts its spirit – the doctrinal and political principle of guardianship of the jurist as formulated by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This doctrine requires that Al-Rakbar – the guarantor of the Islamic character of the state – be the most authoritative Islamic theologian and jurist.
In the 47-year history of the Islamic Republic, this is only the second election for the Supreme Leader. The last time, in 1989, after Khomeini’s death, the constitution had to be amended in order to elect Khamenei Sr. He also did not meet the strict criteria for “Guardianship of the Jurist,” but various factions in the Iranian leadership viewed him as the ideal conciliatory figure.
For many years, Mojtaba Khamenei served as Deputy Head of the Supreme Leader’s Office. He did not make public speeches and generally remained in the shadows. At the same time, several very important functions in the Iranian power system were concentrated in his hands. First, he effectively organized access to the Supreme Leader. Second, he was the main link between him and the security forces, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Third, he controlled the Khamenei family’s finances, most of which was located abroad.
Khamenei Jr. is a typical Aghazadeh. Literally means “son of the master”, but in meaning it is very similar to the “golden youth” and especially the Soviet “nomenclature”. He was less than ten years old at the time of the Islamic Revolution. He grew up as the son of one of the key figures in the Islamic Republic, and his environment consisted mainly of the same people. His wife was the daughter of Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the former speaker of parliament and an influential conservative politician. The current speaker of the House of Representatives, former Iranian police chief and former mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, is a friend of his from his time serving in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the late 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
Mojtaba Khamenei, like his father in the second half of his rule, is associated with the conservative and hard-line security wing of the regime. For him, the main support is not spiritual authority, but violence, embodied primarily in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its Basij youth militia. CountsAnd that in 2009 he was a major player in the rigged elections that left conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second term as president. When Ahmadinejad’s opponents protested in the streets, Khamenei Jr. personally commanded the Basij forces, which brutally suppressed these protests.
Around the same time, Mojtaba Khamenei started a complex network of offshore companies invest Much of the money was received from Iranian oil trading in real estate and hotels abroad. In London alone – more than $130 million, as well as in Germany, France, Spain and other European countries, as well as in Canada and the United Arab Emirates. The main intermediary was and remains an Iranian businessman with a Cypriot passport, Ali Ansari (another friend from his military days), who is under international sanctions due to accusations of corruption and financing the illegal activities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
All of these assets are unlikely to serve as a “backup airport” for Khamenei Jr., but rather as infrastructure to support the IRGC’s activities abroad. Mojtaba Khamenei himself, even before becoming rahbar, closely linked his fate to that of the Iranian regime – and demonstrated his willingness to defend it with all his might against external and internal threats.
The election of Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader means that the security wing has triumphed within the Iranian regime. The new Rahbar is likely to be the “face” of the IRGC dictatorship that was taking shape in Iran even before the war. Some Western observers expressed hope that, in the event of a crisis, the Assembly of Experts would prefer to elect a figure acceptable to the United States to the top position in order to quickly negotiate a ceasefire, such as former reformist President Hassan Rouhani. These hopes were not fulfilled.