Iran’s Assembly of Experts, tasked with vetting and selecting the supreme leader, announced on March 9 that Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been chosen by a majority, after “precise and extensive deliberations.” They called on “the noble nation of Iran, especially the elites and intellectuals of the seminaries and universities, to pledge allegiance” to the new leader tasked with advancing the Islamic system of government that replaced the shah after the 1979 revolution.
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani thanked the Assembly of Experts for convening despite the ongoing airstrikes, including last week’s strike on the Assembly’s headquarters in Qom. He said the selection of the new supreme leader proceeded in a timely and orderly manner, despite “the tricks of enemies who had hoped for a deadlock” following the death of Ali Khamenei. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through its media arm Sepah, has pledged allegiance to the new supreme leader.
Born in 1969, Mojtaba Khamenei is the second of Ali Khamenei’s six children. As a young man, he fought as a volunteer during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and later studied religion in Qom, one of Iran’s holiest cities and a major center of Shia theology.
