More than five months have passed since Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in Tehran in a US-Israeli airstrike. The strike also claimed the lives of several members of his family, including his daughter, a grandchild whose sex has not been disclosed, his son-in-law and his daughter-in-law.
Among those wounded was Khamenei’s eldest son, Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, who would soon emerge as his successor. According to Reuters, Mojtaba sustained severe facial injuries that left him disfigured, along with a serious wound to one or both legs.
His whereabouts have since become one of the most persistent questions surrounding Iran’s leadership. Since taking power in extraordinary circumstances on March 9, the country’s de facto Supreme Leader has been defined less by what he has done in public than by his striking absence from it.
Mojtaba did not appear publicly after his appointment, a silence that may initially have seemed understandable as US and Israeli strikes continued to hit Iran and target senior figures within the regime.
Yet he also failed to issue even a pre-recorded video or audio message. Instead, Iranian state television broadcast a statement said to have been written by him, read aloud by an anchor while a still image of the new Supreme Leader appeared on screen.
He was also absent from his father’s funeral on July 4, with the regime attributing the decision to “security concerns.” Days earlier, on March 20, he broke with three decades of precedent by declining to deliver a televised Nowruz address, a fixture of his father’s rule every Iranian new year.
The silence has continued even as tensions with Washington have sharply escalated. Last week, the United States resumed airstrikes on Iranian military sites after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, attacked tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz. President Donald Trump, increasingly impatient with Tehran, has warned that Washington is “going to beat the f***ing s***” out of Iran.
Still, at a moment of intense national crisis, Iran’s new Supreme Leader remains unseen and unheard.
Mojtaba Khamenei took over as Iran’s Supreme Leader this year after the death of his father
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed during US-Israeli missile strikes on Iran on February 28
‘It is highly questionable whether Mojtaba Khamenei is currently alive or, at the very least, operating at full functional capacity,’ a former Mossad official now with the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) told me.
‘His absence from his father’s funeral is telling. While the top tier of the Iranian regime including his own brothers attended, Mojtaba was nowhere to be seen. In Shiite tradition and Iranian culture, a father’s funeral is a sacred duty. His failure to attend points directly to incapacitation rather than operational caution.’
A nuclear-threshold, wartime state is being led – theoretically, at least – by a man no one has seen in public. Frankly, it’s chaos.
US sources tell me that if Mojtaba is alive, he is likely to be in a highly secure, hidden location, probably underground. Everything from tunnels under Tehran to a bunker near the holy city of Qom has been suggested, but nobody I spoke to claimed to know for certain. ‘Despite five months of relentless bombing, intelligence agencies operate on the assumption that the Iranian regime still retains several secure underground sanctuaries,’ a Western security source told me.
So, is Mojtaba alive? If so, where is he? And is he actually in control of Iran? Three theories have gained traction.
The first (to my mind extremely unlikely) holds that he is alive somewhere in Iran, running things from whatever hole he’s hiding in, but too injured to show his face.
That’s the line that senior Iranian officials are peddling. In a July 21 video published on Iranian state media, President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed that Mojtaba was on the mend. ‘The interaction level with our dear Supreme Leader is increasing day by day and should increase so that we can solve our problems with his guidance,’ Pezeshkian said. This claim, however, should be treated with scepticism.
Theory two holds that he has fled to Russia, which has a long and ignoble tradition of sheltering foreign psychopaths when the going gets tough. Right now, for example, the ostrich-necked former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is enjoying his ‘retirement’ in a luxury villa in Moscow’s exclusive Rublyovka district.
Mourners weeping during Ali Khamenei’s funeral in the city of Mashhad
Thousands watch the procession of Ali Khamenei’s body through the streets of Tehran
Again, I highly doubt this. Say what you like about the mullahs: they don’t tend to run.
Theory three: he’s barely alive, for example in a coma, and at any rate unable to fulfil even basic duties. According to the Saudi channel Al-Hadath, statements bearing his name are drafted by Ahmad Vahidi, the commander-in-chief of the IRGC, and his fellow generals.
This to my mind is the most likely scenario – and, either way, the hunt is well and truly on.
If Mojtaba is indeed alive, he is believed to have avoided phones and computers for roughly five months. Indeed, the absent Mojtaba has acquired a new nickname: ‘The Cardboard Leader’. A rumour that a life-sized cardboard cut-out stood in for him at a pro-regime rally spawned a viral AI video that depicted the cardboard cleric inserted into meetings with Mr Trump and other international figures.
The regime’s response only made things worse. State media pushed AI-generated videos of Mojtaba giving speeches, standing beside his late father and embracing the killed IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani.
This synthetic footage inevitably led many Iranians to reason that if the regime possessed genuine images of its supposed leader, it would not need to fabricate any.
All of this means that the hunt is now based on ‘Humint’, human intelligence.
One Western security source told me: ‘It makes sense for Mojtaba to go totally off-grid like this: don’t forget that Mossad hacked Tehran’s traffic cameras to track the movements of his dad’s bodyguards. So right now all the tech in the world won’t help you [find him]. It’s time to go old-school.’
Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since taking becoming Ayatollah
To do this, Mossad is leaning hard on its long-standing networks of agents inside Iran to see what it can dig up. These have proved invaluable to the Israelis for decades in everything from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists to locating missile sites and hidden regime facilities.
‘The plan will be to use what assets we have inside the country – and we have a lot,’ says my source. ‘We can bribe people, listen to the communications of senior regime figures, and even hack into Iran’s national infrastructure. As of now, the plan is not even to kill him. At least not yet. People just want to know if he’s alive.’
If Mojtaba is alive, he is thought to communicate via notes written on ‘little pieces of paper’, passed through a chain of couriers in which each person knows only the link immediately before and after them. It’s a system Mossad officials liken to the one Osama bin Laden used to elude US intelligence.
‘If he is alive,’ my source continues, ‘reports of him never emerging in daylight because he fears being identified by American spy satellites would make sense – that’s the quickest way to get yourself killed. He’ll be offline and served by a tiny group of trusted lieutenants, almost certainly from the IRGC.’
Mojtaba is himself a (low-ranking) cleric, but he has always been close to the IRGC. He served briefly with an IRGC unit during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and then had several intelligence-linked roles with volunteer paramilitary militia Basij and the IRGC from 2009 onwards.
No matter Mojtaba’s whereabouts, the real power in Iran now sits with the IRGC and has done for some time.
The corps is more than just a military outfit; it’s an intelligence, political and economic empire, embedded into everything from construction and energy to banking and telecommunications, as well as overseeing Iran’s regional proxy network. The country has long been a praetorian state with a clerical veneer. Yes, the mullahs in Qom and Tehran remain influential but, after Khamenei’s death, they no longer sit at the heart of the state.
‘Power in Tehran has effectively shifted,’ says the former Mossad official.
‘The true centre of gravity is now a junta comprising Vahidi (commander-in-chief) and the broader IRGC senior leadership alongside Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and other key leaders within the security establishment.
‘The clerics have been systematically pushed to the margins. The IRGC pretends to take orders from Mojtaba to maintain a facade of continuity; it is, in fact, running the show.’
As Negar Mojtahedi, a journalist with Iran International, points out, though, Iran is perennially faction-ridden. Alongside the Vahidi/IRGC camp, also in the mix, and forming their own faction, are foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and President Pezeshkian, who form the diplomatic and governmental camp. And they are already squabbling.
‘Look at Araghchi’s comments in a recent podcast,’ she adds. ‘He was asked about Mojtaba and said he had never even met him. That struck me as a senior official deliberately signalling that he doesn’t want to be closely identified with Mojtaba.
‘If his leadership is still being consolidated or remains contested or maybe doesn’t even exist within parts of the establishment, a senior official may have an incentive not to appear personally tied to him – especially if power later shifts.’
The truth is that, most likely after the war is over, one of these factions will win out over the others and rule Iran, even if the fiction of Mojtaba’s rule is continued. The future does not bode well.
As Mojtahedi observes: ‘We used to talk about internal battles between hardliners and comparative reformers. But there are no more reformers. Now it will be just hardliner versus hardliner.’
Either way, the IRGC will remain at the centre of things. And this represents a profound transformation: the Revolutionary Guard, created to defend the Islamic Revolution, has become its principal governing force. The revolution has, after almost 50 years, finally devoured itself.
As Mojtahedi adds, the AI-generated memes and the fake Mojtaba missing-person posters reflect something more profound than mockery. ‘The fact is that the people don’t care whether Mojtaba is alive or dead,’ she says. ‘It’s a complete, albeit bitter, joke to them.’
The same indifference surrounds persistent rumours in intelligence circles and Western media – first revealed publicly by the New York Post in March, citing unnamed US intelligence and White House sources – that Mojtaba is secretly gay.
The allegations were lurid: a long-term relationship with a man employed by the Khamenei household, ‘aggressive sexual advances’ towards male carers while recovering from his injuries in the strike that killed his father (who, by its account, doubted his son’s suitability as his successor because of his sexuality).
Predictably, Donald Trump has had a field day, referring gleefully to Iran’s ‘gay dictator’.
A gay Supreme Leader of a regime that has spent decades imprisoning and hanging men for homosexuality. If true, the irony is painful.
Yet inside Iran the response has been little more than a shrug. As Mojtahedi argues, the rumour has failed to gain traction because, like the endless speculation over Mojtaba’s whereabouts, most Iranians simply do not care enough about the man to care who he sleeps with.
A friend in Tehran I will call ‘Reza’ agrees. ‘What difference does it make to us if he is gay or not, or alive or dead?’ he says. ‘The regime will continue to punish us every day. Whether it’s him or another cleric or the Guards. It’s all the same.’
Meanwhile, the Western hunt for Mojtaba continues, even as nobody inside Iran can be bothered to do any real hunting of their own.
