Well, that didn’t take long. Mojtaba Khamenei has risen to the appointment of Iran Supreme Leader, as the country’s national television news service confirmed Monday, however it has since emerged the man following his father into the post has been wounded in an unspecified incident at a time and place unknown.
AP reports television news anchors referred to the mid-level Shiite cleric as “janbaz,” or wounded by the enemy, in the “Ramadan war,” which is how media in Iranian regime refers to the current conflict.
It does not elaborate. However, Khamenei’s father and his wife were killed in the February 28 Israeli airstrike in Tehran that began the fight for freedom.
Iranian state media said the Assembly of Experts, Tehran’s top clerical body, did not hesitate in choosing a new leader despite “the brutal aggression of the criminal America and the evil Zionist regime”, then showed a missile ready for launch bearing the slogan, “At your command, Sayyid Mojtaba.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) agreed.
It issued a statement afforming they were “ready to fully obey and devote the divine orders of the Supreme Leader of the time, Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, and to preserve the values of the Islamic Revolution,” according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.
The Daily Mail notes the “vengeful” hard line cleric is already marked for assassination by Israel after it vowed to “eliminate” whoever succeeded the late Ayatollah.
The news of Mojtaba becoming the next Supreme Leader of Iran comes after President Donald Trump told ABC News the next person to assume that role would “have to get approval” from the United States, adding without approval “he’s not going to last long.”
“He’s going to have to get approval from us,” Trump explained. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”
