Iran on Monday named Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father Ali Khamenei as supreme leader, signalling that hardliners remain firmly in charge, while the week-old U.S.-Israeli war with Iran sent oil prices surging and Asian stock markets into a nosedive.
Iranian institutions and politicians, from the foreign ministry to lawmakers, issued statements expressing their allegiance to the country’s new supreme leader as the war entered its 10th day and fresh missile and drone strikes reverberated across the Middle East.
“We will obey the commander-in-chief until the last drop of our blood,” a statement from the defence council said.
Senior cleric Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli-Larijani said Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment was “a balm for the spiritual suffering of our people and an emphasis on the need to continue the luminous path of the late Imam (Khamenei senior).”
Mojtaba’s father, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, was killed in one of the first strikes launched against Iran more than a week ago.
The show of solidarity for Mojtaba comes after U.S. President Donald Trump earlier rejected him as a candidate to be Iran’s new supreme leader, and Israel saying it would target whoever leads Iran.
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Mojtaba, a cleric with influence inside Iran’s security forces and vast business networks under his father, had been viewed as a frontrunner in the lead-up to Sunday’s vote by the Assembly of Experts, a body of 88 clerics tasked with choosing Ali Khamenei’s successor.
The position gives Mojtaba the final say in all matters of state in the Islamic Republic.
Trump said on Sunday that Washington should have a say in the selection. “If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long,” he told ABC News, adding that ending the war would be a “mutual” decision with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview with the Times of Israel after the new supreme leader was named, Trump declined to respond, saying only “We’ll see what happens,” according to the newspaper.
Pope Leo on Sunday warned of “a tragedy of enormous proportions” due to the “widespread climate of hatred and fear” in Iran and across the region.
“Let us raise our humble prayer to the Lord that the roar of bombs may cease, that weapons may fall silent, and that space may be opened for dialogue in which the voices of peoples can be heard”, Leo said at the Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square.
The Israeli military said on Monday it had begun a wave of attacks in central Iran and had struck infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah militants in Beirut.
Iran and its proxies appeared to have launched attacks too, with rocket and drone strikes targeting a U.S. diplomatic facility near Baghdad’s international airport that were intercepted by C-RAM defence system, said police sources.
A drone strike targeted a U.S. military base near Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan, security sources said, while Saudi authorities reported intercepting a drone east of its northern Jawf region.
