Senior clerics responsible for selecting Iran’s next supreme leader met on Tuesday to deliberate, and the son of the slain former leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, emerged as the clear front-runner, according to three Iranian officials familiar with the deliberations.
The officials said the clerics were considering announcing the son, Mojtaba Khamenei, would be his father’s successor as early as Wednesday morning but that some had expressed reservations, fearing that it could expose him as a target for the United States and Israel. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
Mojtaba Khamenei has been chosen despite a low clerical status – the post is religious as well as political.
His son, wife and mother were killed in Saturday’s US-Israeli strikes along with the supreme leader.
The 88-member assembly of experts are reported to have favoured him over more likely candidates, including national security chief Ali Larijani, chief justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei and Guardian Council member Alireza Arafi.
Mojtaba, (57), is the preferred candidate of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). He served in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War and in 2009 assumed control of the Basij militia, which suppressed mass protests over the contested election to the presidency of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Born in Mashhad, Mojtaba Khamenei is Ali Khamenei’s second-eldest child. He lived for seven years in northwest Iran, where he received his early education. After completing secondary school, he studied Islamic theology with his father and another respected scholar, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, who served as Iran’s chief justice from 1999-2009.
Mujtaba Khamenei concluded his studies to become a cleric in the Shia seminary in the sect’s holy city of Qom.
He is a hojatoleslam, a middle rank several levels below ayatollah.
Although he has not attained high status in the Shia clerical hierarchy, Mojtaba Khamenei has been teaching theology in the Qom Seminary while assuming a top politico-paramilitary role, aiding his father’s repressive domestic regime, and destabilising regional activities.
He has been sanctioned by the US since 2019 for undertaking operations without serving in an official post and collaborating with the IRGC’s Quds branch. This group has conducted covert external intelligence as well as financing and training the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, and the Popular Mobilisation Forces militia in Iraq.
He is also said to be a wealthy businessman, controlling billions of dollars. Bloomberg reported in January that since 2011 he has used intermediaries to move oil revenue assets outside Iran. Iranian banker Ali Ansari, who was sanctioned by Britain last October, was identified as owner or director of some of these transactions. The Financial Times reported the European property portfolio alone is valued at €460.5 million. Additional reporting – The New York Times.
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