Early Monday local time, Iranian state media published a statement from senior clerics confirming what had been widely expected:Mojtaba Khamenei, 56-year-old son of the recently killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been namedIran's new supreme leader.
It is only the third time the position has changed hands since it was created following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The first supreme leader was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the role. The second was Ali Khamenei, who held it for nearly 37 years until US-Israeli strikes killed him. Now his son holds it, chosen in extraordinary circumstances, by clerics meeting virtually because Israel struck the building in Qom where they would normally have gathered in person. The building was empty when the missile hit.
There are some things that are know about him. He has the full religious credentials of an ayatollah, something that gave him a formal qualification his father apparently lacked at the moment of his own ascension. He taught popular Shiite seminary classes. He has deep ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which backed him strongly for the role.
And he has suffered enormous personal loss in the past week. US and Israeli strikes have killed not just his father, but also his wife, Zahra Adel, his mother, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, and one of his sons. He takes power in the middle of a war that has already taken most of his immediate family.
The reason goes to the ideological heart of the Islamic Republic itself. The 1979 revolution was explicitly built on the rejection of monarchy, the overthrow of a hereditary system of power and its replacement with something that derived authority from religion and the people. Handing the supreme leadership from father to son looked uncomfortably like exactly the kind of dynastic transfer the revolution had promised to end.
But those concerns were overridden. A majority of the 88 clerics in the Assembly of Experts pushed for Mojtaba, with some arguing that after the Ayatollah had been killed by America and Israel, choosing his son was a way of honouring his legacy. The IRGC wanted him. Veteran politician and National Security Council head Ali Larijani, a pragmatic operator who has been running much of the country since the crisis began, is an old friend and ally of Mojtaba's. The circles of power closed ranks.
Mojtaba Khamenei inherits all of that, in the middle of sustained US and Israeli bombing, while directing waves of ballistic missiles and drones across the region. Whether he'll succeed in fending off Israel and US, remains to be seen.
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