Who is Mojtaba Khamenei? What we know about Iran's new supreme leader

Iran's Assembly of Experts picked Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his late father as supreme leader, who was killed in the strikes that ignited the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Mojtaba Khamenei, a mid-ranking cleric with influence within Iran's security forces and vast business networks under his father, had been seen as a frontrunner in the lead-up to the assembly vote. The assembly, a body of 88 clerics, was charged with choosing the new leader after Ali Khamenei's death on Feb. 28.

"By a decisive vote, the Assembly of Experts, appointed Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as the third Leader of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran," the assembly said in a statement issued just after midnight Tehran time.

But his role has long been a source of controversy in Iran, with critics rejecting any hint of dynastic politics in a country that overthrew a U.S.-backed monarch in 1979. His appointment will likely draw the ire of President Donald Trump, who said on March 8 that the United States should have a say in the selection.

"If he doesn't get approval from us, he's not going to last long," Trump told ABC News. Israel, ahead of the announcement, threatened to target whoever was chosen.

Here's what we know about Mojtaba Khamenei.

Cleric and shadow figure in Iran

Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 in the holy Shi'ite city of Mashhad and grew up as his father was helping lead the opposition to the Shah. He studied under religious conservatives in the seminaries of Qom, Iran's center of Shi'ite theological learning, and has the clerical rank of Hojjatoleslam.

He served in the military during the Iran-Iraq war as a member of the elite Habib ibn Mazahir al-Asadi Battalion, according to ABC News. He has never held a formal position in the Islamic Republic's government but was widely believed to have been behind the sudden rise of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected president in 2005.

He later backed Ahmadinejad in 2009 when he won a second term in a disputed election, which resulted in anti-government protests violently suppressed by the Basij, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and other security forces.

Public awareness of Mojtaba Khamenei grew during the 2022 women’s rights protests, where he became one of the targets of protesters' ire, according to the Wall Street Journal. "Mojtaba, may you die and not see the leadership," the newspaper reported a crowd chanting in Tehran at the time.

First hereditary transition since the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment marks the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that the role of Supreme Leader has moved from father to son, according to The Guardian.

Though he kept a low profile, Mojtaba Khamenei has had his hands on government power. A U.S. diplomatic cable in 2007, published by WikiLeaks, cited three Iranian sources describing Mojtaba Khamenei as an avenue to reach his father, Reuters reported.

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mojtaba Khamenei in 2019, saying he represented the supreme leader in "an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position" aside from working in his father's office.

Its website said the supreme leader had previously delegated some of his responsibilities to Mojtaba Khamenei, who it said had worked closely with the commander of the IRGC's Quds Force and the Basij "to advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives."

"He has strong constituency and support within the IRGC, in particular amongst the younger radical generations," Kasra Aarabi, head of researching the IRGC at United Against Nuclear Iran, told Reuters.

Wife killed in February airstrikes

Mojtaba Khamenei was a particular target for criticism by protesters during unrest over the death of a young woman in police custody in 2022, after she was arrested for allegedly breaching the Islamic Republic's strict dress codes.

In 2024, a video was widely shared in which he announced the suspension of Islamic jurisprudence classes he was teaching at Qom, fuelling speculation about the reasons.

 His wife, who was killed in the Feb. 28 airstrikes, was the daughter of a prominent hardliner, the former parliament speaker Gholamali Haddadadel.

Contributing: Reuters