Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the ayatollah who was killed in the US-Israeli strikes, has appointed the new leader of Iran, state media reported.
Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new leader a week after his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in US-Israeli strikes.
A statement issued by the Assembly of Experts – a group of Shia clerics charged by Iranian law with choosing the country’s supreme leader – said Mojtaba Khamenei has been elected as the third leader of the Islamic Republic, according to reports by IRIB state TV and Fars, Tasnim and ISNA.
President Donald Trump told Axios last week that the choice would be “unacceptable” and suggested he wants to choose a new supreme leader, a process often overseen by Iran’s clerics.
“They are wasting time, Khamenei’s son is easy, I have to take part in the election,” he said. “Khamenei’s son is not acceptable to me.”
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Trump echoed this in an ABC News interview, saying the new leader “won’t last long” if Iranian leaders don’t get his approval.
The Israel Defense Forces warned on Sunday that any successor to Ali Khamenei would be considered a target.
Mehr News Agency confirmed last week that Khamenei’s son was alive and well after the deadly strikes launched by the United States and Israel killed his father and other family members, including Mojtaba Khamenei’s wife.
Mehr reported that Mojtaba Khamenei was “supervising matters related to the martyrs of the family, managing affairs, and providing consultation and updates on important national issues.”
Mojtaba Khamenei, a politician and cleric, is known to be highly influential among the administration and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But he is not very popular in Iran, and the father-son succession is also unpopular in the country, especially after the 1979 overthrow of the US-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
And he does not have the religious qualities of his father to lead a clerical kingdom that claims to represent God’s will on Earth.
“The majority of Iranians were hoping for a transition to a system of governance that would not be led by an Islamic cleric, but rather by a president and a council of ministers, preceded by, you know, a referendum,” said Valentine Moghadam, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Northeastern University in Boston, speaking before the appointment.
“But that seems unlikely because of the recent attacks by Israel and the United States,” he said.
Questions about Khamenei’s successor have been complicated by the death of then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, long thought to be his successor, in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
But the regime will be eager to show Israel, the US and the Iranian people that it is not falling, said Javed Ali, a former top counterterrorism official and now a professor at the University of Michigan, before his appointment.
“By choosing the next supreme leader, obviously that’s a sign,” he added.
Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, a fellow in the Chatham House program in the Middle East and North Africa, said before his appointment that “a sign that such an appointment will show that nothing will change.”
Despite the little potential support for Iran’s new leader, without regime change in Iran, they are likely to maintain “an iron grip on governance through power centers,” Ali said.
“The next supreme leader will go through that same process,” he added.
The Assembly of Experts last met to elect a new leader in 1989, when they chose Ali Khamenei. The new leader is required to be a man and must be a Muslim cleric under Iranian law.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment as supreme leader makes him an immediate target, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Wednesday that any new leader would be “an unwavering target for elimination.”
He emphasized that Israel and the US will work together to “crush the regime’s power and create conditions for the Iranian people to overthrow it and take over.”
