mojtaba khamenei

Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei (born 8 September 1969) is an Iranian politician and Shia cleric who is the third supreme leader of Iran since 8 March 2026. A member of the Khamenei family and the second son of the second supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, he effectively served as the deputy chief of staff to his father as supreme leader, overseeing access to the latter’s office, and all political and security affairs.
Born in Mashhad into the Azeri–Persian Khamenei family, he was nine when his father emerged as a leading figure in the Iranian Revolution. He received early education in Sardasht and Mahabad, and graduated high school from Tehran; after which, he studied Islamic theology under the guidance of his father and Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. He joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 1987 and served in the Iran–Iraq War. In 1999, he continued his studies in Qom to become a cleric, and joined the Qom Seminary as a theological teacher afterwards. He took control of the Basij paramilitary volunteer militia in 2009.
Following the assassination of his father in the 2026 Iran war, Mojtaba was elected as his successor by Iran's Assembly of Experts. He has previously been sanctioned by the United States Department of the Treasury in 2019 as part of their policy of sanctioning individuals linked to Ali Khamenei. In political ideology and jurisprudence, he is considered to be among the most hardline of the Iranian principlists, and has close ties to some of the "most ideologically extremist clerics" per a report from Atlantic Council. Analysts have generally seen him as more favorable to developing an Iranian nuclear weapons program than his father, supporting a reinterpretation of Ali Khamenei's fatwa against nuclear weapons.

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