Seventh American service member dies in Iran war
A seventh U.S. service member has died from injuries sustained in Iran’s initial counterattack as conflicts continue across the Middle East.
Iran’s Council of Experts has selected Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader to succeed his late father, who was killed in an airstrike that sparked the US-Israel war against Iran.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a mid-ranking cleric with influence within Iran’s security forces and an extensive business network under his father, was seen as the frontrunner for a vote in the 88-member parliament responsible for choosing a new leader after Ali Khamenei’s death.
“By a decisive vote, the Assembly of Experts has appointed Seyyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as the third leader of the Holy Regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the parliament said in a statement shortly after midnight Tehran time.
Her appointment is likely to anger President Donald Trump, who said on March 8 that the United States should have a say in the selection. “If we don’t get approval, it’s not going to last very long,” he told ABC News. Ahead of the announcement, Israel threatened to target whoever was chosen.
Here’s what we know about Mojtaba Khamenei.
Iranian clerics and shadow figures
Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad and grew up with his father helping lead the anti-Shah movement. He studied under religious conservatives at the seminary in Qom, Iran’s center of Shiite theological learning, and holds the clerical rank of Khojatul Eslam.
According to Al Jazeera, he served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)’s Habib Battalion during several operations in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
Although he has never held a formal position in the Islamic Republic’s government, he was widely believed to have been behind the sudden rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardliner who was elected president in 2005.
According to Al Jazeera, government reformers accused Mojtaba Khamenei of rigging the election and using the Revolutionary Guards’ paramilitary Basij force during the 2009 Green Movement after President Ahmadinejad secured a second term.
According to the Wall Street Journal, public awareness of Mojtaba Khamenei increased during the 2022 women’s rights protests, and she became one of the targets of protesters’ anger. The newspaper reported that a crowd in Tehran at the time was chanting, “Mojtaba, may you die without ever seeing your leader.”
First hereditary succession since the Iranian Revolution
According to the Guardian, Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment marks the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that the role of supreme leader has passed from father to son. Mojtaba Khamenei has kept a low profile but has maintained control over government power.
The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Mojtaba Khamenei in 2019 for representing the supreme leader “in an official capacity, despite the fact that he has never been elected or appointed to any government position” other than his father’s office.
The group’s website said the supreme leader had previously delegated some of his responsibilities to Mojtaba Khamenei, who worked closely with commanders of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and the Guards’ Basij, a religious paramilitary group, “to advance his father’s regional destabilizing ambitions and repressive domestic goals.”
“He has a strong constituency and support within the Revolutionary Guards, especially among the young radical generation,” Kasra Arabi, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ research for Iran’s Anti-Nuclear Alliance, told Reuters.
Contributed by: Reuters
