“I guarantee everybody that we are going to not forgo vengeance for the blood of your martyrs,” Ayatollah Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s new ‘Chief of the Revolution’ (Rahbar Enghelab), stated on March 12, in his first public remark after his elevation to the nation’s strongest workplace. “The vengeance we keep in mind will not be restricted to the martyrdom of the good chief of the Revolution,” the 56-year-old cleric stated, referring to the assassination of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28 by a U.S.-Israeli joint strike. “Fairly, each member of the nation who’s martyred by the enemy constitutes an unbiased topic within the file of vengeance,” he stated in a press release issued in Farsi.
The youthful Khamenei was at Ali Khamenei’s residence in Tehran when it was struck on the primary day of the continuing battle. He misplaced his father, who had been Iran’s rahbar for 37 years, in addition to his mom and his spouse, together with different prime officers of the Islamic Republic. “He [Mojtaba] was there, and he was injured in his legs and hand and arm… within the bombardment,” Iran’s Ambassador to Cyprus, Alireza Salarian, later stated. Yousef Pezeshkian, son of President Masoud Pezeshkian, wrote in a social media submit on March 11 that Mojtaba was injured “however secure and sound”.
A wounded man who misplaced his mother and father and spouse and was elected the ‘Supreme Chief’ of a nation beneath assault from the world’s strongest nation and its closest ally, Mojtaba Khamenei now faces a uncommon disaster his predecessors by no means confronted — to outlive the storm and protect the republic.
Warfare and religion
Born in 1969 within the Shia holy metropolis of Mashhad, Mojtaba grew up within the Shah’s Iran. His father was one of many figureheads of the clerical opposition in the direction of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Within the years earlier than the 1979 revolution, Ali Khamenei, together with Abbas Vaez-Tabasi and Sayyed Abdolkarim Hasheminejad, two different clerics, fashioned a management council to organise protests and political actions in Mashhad towards the Shah’s rule. After the revolution, Ali Khamenei grew to become a Deputy Defence Minister within the revolutionary authorities. Hasheminejad was assassinated in 1981. Vaez-Tabasi would go on to carry key positions within the clerical institution of the republic till his dying in 2016.
Mojtaba, who was 9 on the time of the revolution, moved to Tehran along with his household. He attended Alavi Excessive College, a outstanding non-public non secular college in central Tehran. In 1987, at 17, Mojtaba joined the armed forces to struggle the battle towards Iraq. In line with an official documentary of his life, he served in the course of the battle “as a easy Basij”. The Basij, a paramilitary volunteer organisation, is without doubt one of the key branches of the Islamic Republic’s safety equipment.
Ayatollah Khomeini accepted a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, which he in comparison with “ingesting poison”. After his dying in 1989, Ali Khamenei was chosen because the second rahbar. Mojtaba began his non secular research in Qom after the battle. Certainly one of his early lecturers was Sayyed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, who would later turn into Iran’s judiciary chief. In 1999, he went again to Qom for superior theological research. Within the metropolis of seminaries, he joined the ranks of clerics together with Mesbah Yazdi, a scholar, ‘principalist’ (hardliner) and a member of the Meeting of Consultants (from 1999 to 2016); and Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayegani, the primary Secretary-Basic of the Guardian Council within the Nineteen Eighties. By 2004, Mojtaba began educating ‘Kharij-e Feqh’ (superior jurisprudence), in response to the official biography. He was “thought to be the professor of one of the crowded high-level seminary lessons.” It says he’s fluent in Farsi, Arabic and English and has accomplished specialised research in psychology and psychoanalysis.
Though Mojtaba by no means held a constitutional place, he emerged as a key pillar of Iran’s clerical institution and an ally of the safety wing in the course of the lengthy interval of his father’s reign. “Ayatollah Mojtaba maintained sturdy ties with figures related to the Axis of Resistance,” reads a profile of the cleric on Press TV’s web site. He was very near Qassem Soleimani, the charismatic Quds Pressure commander who was assassinated by the U.S. in January 2020 in Baghdad. Soleimani, who coordinated with Iran’s non-state allies in West Asia, was one of many key architects of the ‘axis of resistance’ technique.
In November 2019, when the U.S. Treasury Division imposed sanctions on Mojtaba, one of many causes it listed was the youthful Khamenei’s shut ties with the Quds Pressure and Basij. “Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the Supreme Chief, is designated at the moment for representing the Supreme Chief in an official capability regardless of by no means being elected or appointed to a authorities place. The Supreme Chief has delegated part of his management duties to Mojtaba Khamenei, who labored carefully with the commander of the IRGC-Quds Pressure [who at that time was headed by Soleimani] and in addition Basij to advance his father’s destabilising regional ambitions and oppressive home aims,” learn the Treasury assertion.
Mojtaba maintained shut ties with each Basij and IRGC from the late Nineteen Eighties. A biography on PBS claimed that Mojtaba was a pal of Saeed Emami, a Deputy Intelligence Minister and one of the highly effective safety commissars in Iran within the Nineties. Emami was accused of working dying squads that hunted down anti-revolutionary items overseas (the so-called ‘chain murders’ of the Nineties). Brigadier Gen. Sayyed Mohammad Hejazi, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq battle and a former Basij commander, was additionally thought-about an in depth aide of Mojtaba. These relationships helped him keep his affect over the IRGC, Quds Pressure, Basij and intelligence networks over time.
He had additionally confronted allegations of meddling within the political course of — one thing the Supreme Chief’s Workplace had at all times, not less than publicly, stayed away from. In 2005, Mahdi Karroubi, a former speaker of Majles and a reformist candidate within the 2005 presidential election, wrote to Ali Khamenei, saying Mojtaba had interfered within the elections and supported and campaigned for one candidate (he was referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). Ali Khamenei rejected the accusations. In 2009, after the disputed elections sparked protests in Iran, Basij cracked down on the demonstrations. Mojtaba had backed Ahmadinejad’s reelection.
In recent times, he had been extensively rumoured as a possible successor to his father. An Ayatollah who reduce his tooth within the Iran-Iraq battle, a instructor from Qom who effortlessly navigates the facility corridors of Iran’s theocracy, navy institution, and fractious polity, Mojtaba, who at all times largely prevented worldwide media consideration, was seen by many as a pure candidate. But, the core concept of the Islamic revolution was explicitly against dynastic rule. Hereditary succession was “sinister”, “evil” and “invalid”, which had “no place in Islam,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founding father of the Islamic Republic, as soon as wrote. Ali Khamenei himself had by no means publicly steered that Mojtaba may succeed him.
However in a second of disaster, members of Iran’s 88-member Meeting of Consultants, the clerical physique that chooses the Supreme Chief, picked Mojtaba, sending a transparent message of continuity and defiance. After killing Ali Khamenei, U.S. President Donald Trump had stated Mojtaba wouldn’t be acceptable to him and that he must be concerned within the collection of the brand new Supreme Chief. After his appointment, Mojtaba vowed revenge, saying the battle wouldn’t be over except sufficient enemy blood was shed. “He would strike the [enemy] traces heroically,” says a commander within the official documentary concerning the rahbar.
Revealed – March 15, 2026 01:34 am IST