Iran’s Next Supreme Leader Confirmed

Iran has chosen a new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike on Tehran in late February, the first day of the war between the United States (US), Israel, and Iran.

Ali Khamenei was Iran’s second Supreme Leader, ruling from 1989 until his death last month.

Mojtaba Khamenei is a 56-year-old Shia cleric who for years built his influence inside Iran’s clerical establishment and, more importantly, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a military force operating parallel to the Iranian army that serves to primarily protect the Iranian theocratic regime and act as its ideological enforcers. Mojtaba acted as a behind-the-scenes bridge between the regime’s security services, militant clergy, and the IRGC itself.

Under Iran’s constitution the Supreme Leader is selected by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member council of Shia clerics elected by the public. But the process is far from a straightforward democratic contest. The selection system ensures that only ideologically loyal clerics can run for the Assembly in the first place, meaning the body tasked with choosing the country’s highest authority is drawn from a carefully filtered political pool that tends to favour ideological hardliners such as Mojtaba.

Born in 1969 in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, he grew up during the revolutionary upheaval that brought his father and other clerics to power in 1979. Mashhad is one of the holiest cities in Shia Islam, home to the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia Imam, and a major pilgrimage destination visited by millions of worshippers each year. For the son of a rising revolutionary cleric, it was an environment steeped in religious authority and Islamist politics.

Mojtaba came of age during the Iran–Iraq war, the brutal eight-year conflict between Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that helped forge the Islamic Republic’s security mindset. Like many young men of his generation he joined the war effort, reportedly serving with units connected to the IRGC. The experience placed him inside the military institutions that would later become central to his political influence.

After the war he pursued religious studies in the seminaries of Qom, the city south of Tehran that functions as the intellectual centre of Shia clerical education. There he trained as a cleric and immersed himself in the networks of Iran’s religious establishment.

But unlike many clerics who built careers through preaching or scholarship, Mojtaba gravitated toward the political machinery of the state. By the 1990s and early 2000s he had become a trusted figure inside the office of the Supreme Leader, acting as a close aide to his father while quietly building relationships with commanders in the IRGC and the Basij militia, a vast paramilitary force operating under the command of the IRGC, frequently used to repress the people of Iran.

Those relationships would prove critical. Over time Mojtaba emerged as a behind-the-scenes broker linking hardline clerics, security officials and elements of Iran’s intelligence services. Despite holding no major public office, he became widely viewed inside Iran’s political system as a powerful gatekeeper within the leader’s inner circle.

His influence came under particular scrutiny during the disputed 2009 presidential election, when critics accused him of backing hardline factions and supporting the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a radical Islamist president known for Holocaust denial, extreme anti-Western rhetoric, and uncompromising revolutionary ideology whose victory triggered mass protests across Iran. The demonstrations, known as the Green Movement, were violently suppressed by the regime’s security forces, leaving dozens of people dead and thousands arrested.

For much of the following decade Mojtaba remained largely invisible to the Iranian public. Yet within the inner circles of power he had quietly built something far more important than public recognition: a network of relationships with the clerical establishment and the security forces that underpin the Islamic Republic’s authority.

Mojtaba is now the most powerful person in Iran. His actions over the next few days and weeks will determine for just how long that will remain the case.