Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being tipped to rise up and assume leadership of the country despite the fact he’s never been elected or appointed to a government role.
Rather, the mid-level Shiite cleric will inherit the position purely through an accident of birth as his daddy’s good boy, as multiple outlets confirm.
AP reports the younger Khamenei has not been seen publicly since Saturday, when the Israeli airstrike targeting the supreme leader’s offices killed his 86-year-old father as part of Operation Epic Fury.
Khamenei has reportedly survived the strike and is seen by the establishment as firming to assume the role of next supreme leader, two Iranian sources told Reuters on Wednesday.
The 56-year-old is reported to have been selected as the primary candidate after two meetings of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, Iranian officials told the New York Times.
The Assembly of Experts is a powerful collective of 88 Islamic religious scholars who have all undergone a strict vetting process by the Guardian Council in order to determine their loyalty to the supreme leaders. Their duty is to appoint and supervise the supreme leader.
An infographic titled “Process to determine the successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran” created in Istanbul, Turkiye on March 2, 2026. (Photo by Efnan Ipsir/Anadolu via Getty Images)
After pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the decision to elect Mojtaba Khamenei was made, according to Iran International, an independent news outlet.
As Breitbart’s Frances Martel reported, some other names in Western media, such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the leader before the Iranian Revolution, and Maryam Rajavi, the exiled leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), regularly circulate as options.
Given the regime’s oppression it is essentially impossible to effectively gauge whether they, or anyone else, is popular as a potential alternative to Khamenei within Iran itself.
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President Trump told CBS News on Saturday he knows “exactly who” will succeed the regime, but refused to name them.
If Mojtaba Khamenei is handed the role, it will be an awkward moment as the Islamic Republic has long criticized hereditary rule and cast itself as a more just alternative.
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