Mojtaba Khamenei, son of ayatollah killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes, named Iran’s new supreme leader, state media reports

(NBC News)- Mojtaba Khamenei has been named as Iran’s new supreme leader, succeeding his father just over a week after he 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.

The second son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba, 56, is widely viewed as a hardline figure with close ties to the powerful Revolutionary Guard. Israel has already described him as a potential target, while Trump had called him “unacceptable.”

The younger Khamenei had been considered a potential leader prior to the American-Israeli attack that killed his father, though the idea was not universally popular given the 1979 toppling of the U.S.-backed hereditary monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

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.

Mojtaba has not been heard from since the start of the conflict.

A politician and cleric, he is known to hold significant influence among regime administrators and the Revolutionary Guard, the paramilitary force leading Iran’s retaliatory campaign.

But he lacks the religious credentials of his father to lead a clerical regime, which claims to represent God’s will on Earth.

His father became supreme leader in 1989, and soon Mojtaba Khamenei and his family had access to the billions of dollars and business assets spread across the globe.

His own power rose in the years to come, with U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in the late 2000s referring to the younger Khamenei as “the power behind the robes.” The United States sanctioned him in 2019 during Trump’s first term over working to “advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives.”

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.”

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.

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 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.