Tehran Nepo Baby

Welcome to a special edition of the MBN Iran Newsletter. The naming of a new supreme leader demands an immediate assessment of the ultimate nepo baby: Mojtaba Khamenei.

Also: I joined MBN’s CEO and President Jeff Gedmin, journalist and commentator Roya Hakakian, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Elliott Abrams in a discussion about Iran’s future last week. Watch it here.

Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the newsletter, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship Alhurra Arabic-language and English-language news sites.

Quote of the Week

“[Iran’s next supreme leader] is going to have to get approval from us. If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long.”

– U.S. President Donald Trump

Who is Mojtaba?

He might not have been chosen under normal circumstances. Senior clerics had long indicated discomfort with both his thin religious credentials and the symbolism of a son inheriting his father’s office. It had been widely reported for some years now that the father didn’t want his son to succeed him, allegedly once saying that he “didn’t want the Islamic Republic to turn into a monarchy.” Last year, reports said that during the 12-day war with Israel and the U.S., Khamenei named three senior clerics as possible successors – and none of them was his son Mojtaba.

The job of Supreme Leader is supposed to go to a serious, respected scholar of Islamic theology. Mojtaba is anything but. The Islamic Republic has never stopped insisting that the revolution of 1979 constituted a radical break with the system of hereditary monarchy and that the man at the top must be a learned jurist chosen on merit, not bloodline. By design, the supreme leader is meant to be a senior religious figure, steeped in Islamic law, with the kind of theological stature that makes millions of believers comfortable following his rulings in both religious and political life.

In 1979, the job description was written for a giant of the Shia clerical establishment to assume the role, and the constitution said the supreme leader had to be a grand ayatollah, a top reference point for ordinary believers on questions of religion, which Ali Khamenei plainly was not when he succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1989, after Khomeini’s death and once the inner circle had settled on Khamenei anyway, they revised the constitution so that any Islamic jurist with the right political skills could be supreme leader, changing the law not to choose a leader but to catch up with the choice they had already made.

A mid‑ranking cleric with no serious religious following of his own, Mojtaba is even further from the original ideal. Some state‑adjacent media already began referring to him as an “ayatollah” in 2022, even though he had nothing like the standing or following that title usually implies among senior Shia clerics. In their coverage of Sunday’s announcement, Iranian state TV and news agencies repeatedly called him “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei” in the formal reports, but there is no indication that he actually achieved that theological status.

Many in the regime clearly would have opposed Mojtaba under normal conditions. But the equation looked different with him orphaned by enemy bombs. In a calmer moment, with no airstrikes on Tehran and no sense that the whole system might be slipping out of control, their objections might well have blocked him in the Assembly of Experts. Wartime pressure changed everything.

He’s not a brilliant Islamic scholar and he’s the ultimate nepo baby. So why him? Mojtaba was chosen because the IRGC and the security services already trusted him. For years he has been the fixer inside his father’s office who speaks their language, protects their interests, and helps manage elections and crackdowns. When Ali Khamenei was killed and the real powers in Iran needed a reliable wartime boss, the son they knew beat out the clerics they did not.

Mojtaba earned that trust gradually by becoming increasingly useful over the past two decades, sitting at the center of his father’s office, controlling access, budgets and sensitive files, in constant contact with IRGC and intelligence commanders. And they saw him deliver for them in key moments like the 2009 election crisis. At that time, when the disputed reelection victory by sitting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced and protests ensued, security forces and Basij units under IRGC command moved in with live fire, mass beatings, and dragnet arrests that ensnared thousands of protesters in a matter of days. Witnesses and later investigations describe people shot in the streets, demonstrators chased into residential buildings, detainees tortured and raped, and dozens killed. Several sources have explicitly named Mojtaba as the man inside the Leader’s office urging the Guards and Basij not to hold back.

Mojtaba has deep, personal ties to the Guards’ most hardline commanders and to the security organs that now run politics, war, and the economy. Those same networks see him as the guarantor of continuity: keeping Ali Khamenei’s hard‑line, security‑first approach intact in a time of war, regional confrontation, and intense external pressure.

Within hours of the announcement, the IRGC and Iran’s regular armed forces issued nearly‑identical statements pledging “complete obedience” and “self‑sacrifice” under the command of “Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei.”

Mojtaba’s social base is narrow and shallow, but his ties to the men who command the guns and the money are broad and deep.

He has a target on his back. Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz has publicly warned that any successor to Ali Khamenei “will be an unequivocal target for elimination. It does not matter what his name is or where he hides.”

In an Axios interview published on March 5, U.S. President Donald Trump said “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me” and insisted that he “has to be involved” in picking Iran’s next leader. Since Mojtaba’s selection yesterday, Washington has added no new public line beyond the president’s earlier warning.

So what can we expect? Expect Mojtaba to tighten internal controls further and rule with an iron fist, deepening the reliance of the political system on the security organs around him. He takes power under open threats from Israel and, in all likelihood, a lack of unanimity about the decision: His appointment has not erased existing rivalries among IRGC commanders and senior clerics.

And he’s unlikely to be universally beloved by a population that saw security forces massacre thousands just two months ago. In Tehran neighborhoods like Ekbatan, widely shared social media clips show residents leaning out of apartment windows to shout “death to Mojtaba” after his elevation was announced. (Such reports can’t be independently verified.)

Mojtaba takes the helm of a state that looks far more brittle than the one his father inherited in 1989. He now presides over a capital under bombardment, an economy already ravaged by sanctions and inflation, and a society reeling from the January massacres, when security forces killed thousands of protesters in just two days and then flooded the country with arrests, disappearances, and fear. His religious credentials are thin, his popular mandate nonexistent, and his real base of support sits in the barracks and the intelligence directorates.

Might he be a secret reformer, à la Gorbachev? Not likely, if we look at his past. As one report in 2023 put it, “the idea that Mojtaba will emerge as the next radical modernizer in the region is nothing but wishful thinking.”

A conciliator or dove inclined to find an accommodation with the U.S. and Israel? I posed this possibility yesterday to an analyst colleague. “Dude,” he said, “they killed his dad.”

Fire burns and smoke rises from a Tehran oil depot after being hit by a strike. Photo: Reuters

Some Must Reads

New York Times: Who Is Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s New Supreme Leader?. An excellent overview of his networks and how the succession was stage‑managed.

The Washington Institute for Near Policy: What Kind of Supreme Leader Would Mojtaba Khamenei Be?. A policy‑minded look at how he might rule, with emphasis on IRGC and office‑of‑the‑leader ties.​

Critical Threats: Iran Update Evening Special Report, March 8, 2026. A strong explainer of how his appointment intersects with the war and the refinery and fuel‑depot strikes.​

Shafaqna (global Shia news service based in Qom): Assembly of Experts announces: Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei has become the third leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The article tells us that the choice was made “after careful and extensive studies” despite “the bombing of the offices of the Secretariat of the Assembly of Experts” in the “brutal aggression of the criminal America and the evil Zionist regime.”