Mojtaba Khamenei | The cleric with a gun

“I assure everyone that we will not forgo vengeance for the blood of your martyrs,” Ayatollah Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s new ‘Leader of the Revolution’ (Rahbar Enghelab), said on March 12, in his first public comment after his elevation to the country’s most powerful office. “The vengeance we have in mind is not limited to the martyrdom of the great leader of the Revolution,” the 56-year-old cleric said, referring to the assassination of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28 by a U.S.-Israeli joint strike. “Rather, every member of the nation who is martyred by the enemy constitutes an independent subject in the file of vengeance,” he said in a statement issued in Farsi.

The younger Khamenei was at Ali Khamenei’s residence in Tehran when it was struck on the first day of the ongoing war. He lost his father, who had been Iran’s rahbar for 37 years, as well as his mother and his wife, along with other top officials of the Islamic Republic. “He [Mojtaba] was there, and he was injured in his legs and hand and arm… in the bombardment,” Iran’s Ambassador to Cyprus, Alireza Salarian, later said. Yousef Pezeshkian, son of President Masoud Pezeshkian, wrote in a social media post on March 11 that Mojtaba was injured “but safe and sound”.

A wounded man who lost his parents and wife and was elected the ‘Supreme Leader’ of a nation under attack from the world’s most powerful country and its closest ally, Mojtaba Khamenei now faces a rare crisis his predecessors never confronted — to survive the storm and preserve the republic.

War and faith

Born in 1969 in the Shia holy city of Mashhad, Mojtaba grew up in the Shah’s Iran. His father was one of the figureheads of the clerical opposition towards Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the years before the 1979 revolution, Ali Khamenei, along with Abbas Vaez-Tabasi and Sayyed Abdolkarim Hasheminejad, two other clerics, formed a leadership council to organise protests and political activities in Mashhad against the Shah’s rule. After the revolution, Ali Khamenei became a Deputy Defence Minister in the revolutionary government. Hasheminejad was assassinated in 1981. Vaez-Tabasi would go on to hold key positions in the clerical establishment of the republic until his death in 2016.

Mojtaba, who was nine at the time of the revolution, moved to Tehran with his family. He attended Alavi High School, a prominent private religious school in central Tehran. In 1987, at 17, Mojtaba joined the armed forces to fight the war against Iraq. According to an official documentary of his life, he served during the war “as a simple Basij”. The Basij, a paramilitary volunteer organisation, is one of the key branches of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus.

Ayatollah Khomeini accepted a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, which he compared to “drinking poison”. After his death in 1989, Ali Khamenei was chosen as the second rahbar. Mojtaba started his religious studies in Qom after the war. One of his early teachers was Sayyed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, who would later become Iran’s judiciary chief. In 1999, he went back to Qom for advanced theological studies. In the city of seminaries, he joined the ranks of clerics along with Mesbah Yazdi, a scholar, ‘principalist’ (hardliner) and a member of the Assembly of Experts (from 1999 to 2016); and Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayegani, the first Secretary-General of the Guardian Council in the 1980s. By 2004, Mojtaba started teaching ‘Kharij-e Feqh’ (advanced jurisprudence), according to the official biography. He was “regarded as the professor of one of the most crowded high-level seminary classes.” It says he is fluent in Farsi, Arabic and English and has completed specialised studies in psychology and psychoanalysis.

Even though Mojtaba never held a constitutional position, he emerged as a key pillar of Iran’s clerical establishment and an ally of the security wing during the long period of his father’s reign. “Ayatollah Mojtaba maintained strong ties with figures associated with the Axis of Resistance,” reads a profile of the cleric on Press TV’s website. He was very close to Qassem Soleimani, the charismatic Quds Force 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 the key architects of the ‘axis of resistance’ strategy.

In November 2019, when the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mojtaba, one of the reasons it listed was the younger Khamenei’s close ties with the Quds Force and Basij. “Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the Supreme Leader, is designated today for representing the Supreme Leader in an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position. The Supreme Leader has delegated a part of his leadership responsibilities to Mojtaba Khamenei, who worked closely with the commander of the IRGC-Quds Force [who at that time was headed by Soleimani] and also Basij to advance his father’s destabilising regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives,” read the Treasury statement.

Mojtaba maintained close ties with both Basij and IRGC from the late 1980s. A biography on PBS claimed that Mojtaba was a friend of Saeed Emami, a Deputy Intelligence Minister and one of the most powerful security commissars in Iran in the 1990s. Emami was accused of running death squads that hunted down anti-revolutionary units abroad (the so-called ‘chain murders’ of the 1990s). Brigadier Gen. Sayyed Mohammad Hejazi, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and a former Basij commander, was also considered a close aide of Mojtaba. These relationships helped him maintain his influence over the IRGC, Quds Force, Basij and intelligence networks over the years.

He had also faced allegations of meddling in the political process — something the Supreme Leader’s Office had always, at least publicly, stayed away from. In 2005, Mahdi Karroubi, a former speaker of Majles and a reformist candidate in the 2005 presidential election, wrote to Ali Khamenei, saying Mojtaba had interfered in 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 years, he had been widely rumoured as a potential successor to his father. An Ayatollah who cut his teeth in the Iran-Iraq war, a teacher from Qom who effortlessly navigates the power corridors of Iran’s theocracy, military establishment, and fractious polity, Mojtaba, who always largely avoided international media attention, was seen by many as a natural candidate. Yet, the core idea of the Islamic revolution was explicitly opposed to dynastic rule. Hereditary succession was “sinister”, “evil” and “invalid”, which had “no place in Islam,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, once wrote. Ali Khamenei himself had never publicly suggested that Mojtaba could succeed him.

But in a moment of crisis, members of Iran’s 88-member Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that chooses the Supreme Leader, picked Mojtaba, sending a clear message of continuity and defiance. After killing Ali Khamenei, U.S. President Donald Trump had said Mojtaba would not be acceptable to him and that he should be involved in the selection of the new Supreme Leader. After his appointment, Mojtaba vowed revenge, saying the war would not be over unless enough enemy blood was shed. “He would strike the [enemy] lines heroically,” says a commander in the official documentary about the rahbar.

Published – March 15, 2026 01:34 am IST