Iran's Assembly of Experts has chosen a new supreme leader.
His name is Mojtaba Khamenei. He is 56 years old.
He is the son of the man killed by American and Israeli bombs 9
days ago. And he was chosen not through a
calm constitutional process of religious deliberation, but
under direct pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps in wartime, in secret, in a process that multiple assembly
members tried to boycott and that raises serious questions
about its constitutional legitimacy.
It is Sunday, March 8th, 2026, day nine of Operation Epic Fury,
and Islamic Republic of Iran has just done something it has never
done in its 47 year history. It has passed power within the
same family for the first time since the 1979 revolution.
Iran has a dynastic succession. The son of the Supreme Leader
has become the Supreme Leader. This is episode 9 of Epic Fury,
the US Iran war podcast. There is an enormous amount to
cover. Let us get into it.
Mojtaba Khamenei was born on September 8th, 1969.
He is a mid ranking Shia cleric holding the rank of Hojatolslam,
one level below the rank of Ayatollah.
He is never held formal elected office.
He has never run for a public election of any kind.
He is never given a press conference.
For decades, he operated almost entirely in the shadows of his
father's administration, serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff of
the Office of the Supreme Leader for Political and Security
Affairs since 1997. He was, in effect, his father's
gatekeeper, his fixer, his most trusted operative.
He has deep, long standing ties to the IRGC going back decades.
He was a key channel between his father and the Guards
leadership. He was widely believed to have
played a direct role in orchestrating the crackdown on
protesters during the Green Movement in 2009.
He was believed to have been directly in charge of the Basich
paramilitary force that has been at the center of multiple brutal
crackdowns on Iranian civil society.
He was placed under United States sanctions in 2019 for
acting in place of the Supreme Leader without ever being
elected or appointed to any official position, and for
working closely with the Kurds force on covert operations,
including lethal aid, intelligence, financing and
training for the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian
Islamic Jihad and Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces.
A Bloomberg investigation published in January 2026
reported that he is linked to an offshore financial network
holding high value real estate in London and Dubai, interests
connected to shipping, banking and hospitality assets across
Europe, structured through intermediaries and layered
corporate entities. This is the man the IRGC has
chosen to lead Iran. Not through careful religious
deliberation, through pressure. According to Iran International,
IRGC commanders began pressuring Assembly of Experts members on
March 3rd, conducting in person meetings and phone calls
demanding they vote for Mojtaba Khamenei. 8 Assembly members
stated publicly they would boycott a second electoral
session plan for March 5th because of the heavy pressure.
They described the process as constitutionally irregular.
On March 8th, multiple Assembly members told Iranian state media
and the Fars news agency that a decisive and unanimous opinion
have been reached. Ayatollah Mohammad Mahdi
Murbagiri said great efforts to determine the leadership have
been made. Iran's parliament issued a
bulletin ordering all Iranians to perform their duty to obey
regardless of who was chosen. The constitutional questions
surrounding the succession are significant and cannot be
dismissed. Iran's constitution requires the
Supreme Leader to be a senior jurist with deep knowledge of
jurisprudence in Shia Islam. Mojtaba Khamenei is a hoja toll
slam, not an Ayatollah. He does not, on a
straightforward reading of the constitution, meet the required
religious qualifications. His father faced a similar
problem in 1989. He was also not an Ayatollah
when chosen, and the law was amended to accommodate him.
A similar constitutional accommodation may be in the
works for the Sun, but amending a constitution under bombardment
under IRGC pressure, with eight assembly members boycotting and
the meeting building previously targeted by Israeli airstrikes
is not what any legal theorist would describe as a legitimate
constitutional process. The Islamic Republic was founded
in explicit repudiation of the Pallavi monarchy.
The first principle of the revolution was that hereditary
rule was illegitimate, corrupt and UN Islamic. 47 years later,
the Islamic Republic has produced its own hereditary
succession. The son of the supreme leader
has inherited the office of supreme leader.
The ideological contradiction at the heart of this decision is
one that many Iranians, including religious
conservatives, who have supported the Islamic Republic
throughout their lives, will find deeply uncomfortable.
Donald Trump has said publicly in capital letters that Mojtaba
Khamenei is unacceptable, he told reporters.
They are wasting their time. Trump has framed his entire
involvement in the succession question around the idea that
the new supreme leader must be someone who treats the United
States and Israel well. Mojtaba Khamenei has spent his
adult life building the networks that funded Hamas, Hezbollah and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He has personal ties to every
proxy force the Islamic Republic has deployed against Israel and
the United States for the past three decades.
His ascension to the role of supreme leader does not signal a
softer Iran. It signals an Iran that views
the United States as an implacable enemy and is likely
to escalate rather than compromise.
Iran's foreign minister Arachi appeared on NBC's Meet the Press
on Sunday morning and was asked directly who the new supreme
leader would be. His answer was striking, he
said. Nobody knows, he said.
There are lots of rumors, but we have to wait for the Assembly of
Experts to convene and vote. He said this on the same morning
that multiple assembly members had already told Iranian state
media that a decision had been made.
Either Arachi genuinely did not know which would tell its own
story about the fractures between Iran's civilian
government and its security apparatus, where he knew and was
deliberately maintaining deniability while the
announcement was being prepared. Either interpretation is
significant. Arachi also repeated on Sunday
that Iran has not asked for a ceasefire.
He said in June last year Iran had accepted a ceasefire, but
this time there needed to be a permanent end to the war.
He said no one wants to continue this war.
He said Iran will continue to act in self-defense, and he
insisted that Iran was not attacking its neighbors, but
rather United States facilities and installations in Gulf Arab
countries. That framing that every Iranian
strike on a Gulf state is an act of self-defense against American
facilities rather than an attack on a sovereign country is
Tehran's legal and political architecture for the entire
counter operation. The governments of Qatar,
Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates do
not share that framing. President Posseshkian made one
of the most extraordinary statements of the entire
conflict on Saturday. He appeared on Iranian state
media and issued a personal apology to neighboring countries
that Iran had targeted with strikes since the conflict
began, he said. I find it necessary here to
apologize on my own behalf to the neighboring countries that
have been attacked by Iran. He said Iran had no intention of
aggression toward neighboring countries.
Call them brothers. He added that Iran would no
longer initiate such attacks in the region as long as those
countries territories were not used to attack Iran.
Hours later, Posseschian issued a separate statement on social
media emphasizing Iran's right to self-defense.
His office then said that his original remarks have been
misinterpreted by the enemy seeking to sow division.
Posseschian is Iran's elected president.
He is a moderate. He ran on a platform of
engagement with the West. He is the public face of a
government whose military wing is simultaneously firing its
27th wave of strikes at Israel and whose intelligence
operatives are, according to the New York Times, secretly
reaching out to the CIA about ending the war.
The gap between possessions, public apologetic tone and the
military reality of an ongoing wave of IRGC strikes into Gulf
states illustrates in the starkest possible terms how
divided Iran's government is at this precise moment.
The moderate civilian leadership is apologizing to neighbors.
The IRGC is firing at them. These are not coherent
positions. They represent a government
operating in multiple contradictory directions
simultaneously. Under the most extreme pressure
in the Islamic Republic's history.
The military campaign on Sunday continued at a pace that shows
no sign of deceleration. The Israeli Air Force announced
wide scale strikes on Iranian regime targets in Tehran and
additional areas across the country.
The IDF confirmed it had struck military infrastructure at
Meribat Airport, which it described as a central hub used
by the IRGC to arm and fund its terror proxies across the Middle
East. Meribat Airport is one of the
two main international airports serving Tehran.
Its designation as an IRGC logistics hub and its subsequent
bombardment marks another significant escalation in the
targeting of infrastructure that serves both military and
civilian purposes. Israel also struck Beirut on
Sunday. The IDF conducted A targeted
strike on key commanders of the IRGCS Quds Force in Lebanon's
capital. Lebanon's Health Ministry
reported that four people were killed in a strike on a hotel in
the Rauch area, a popular sea front tourist district of Beirut
that remained untouched throughout the 2024 Israel
Hezbollah war. The Rauch neighborhood is home
to restaurants, hotels and the famous Rauch Rock, one of the
most photographed landmarks in Lebanon.
Its targeting on Sunday marks a geographic and symbolic
expansion of Israeli strikes in Beirut beyond the southern
suburbs, where Hezbollah's infrastructure is concentrated.
Iran's IRGC described its latest attack on Israel as the 27th
wave of Operation True Promise. Air raid sirens were activated
in southern Israel, including in the Najaf desert.
Hezbollah carried out several attacks on Israeli military
sites and northern Israeli cities.
Two Israeli soldiers were confirmed killed in combat in
southern Lebanon, the first Israeli military death since the
fighting with Hezbollah restarted.
Israel has now suffered casualties on 2 fronts
simultaneously, Iranian missile attacks on its territory from
the north and east and Hezbollah ground and rocket attacks on its
northern border. Russia has been providing Iran
with intelligence about the locations of American warships
and military targets. Confirmed independently by NPR,
Russia's provision of targeting intelligence to a country being
bombed by American forces represents the most direct
Russian involvement in any conflict with American forces
since the Cold War. Multiple United States senators
had demanded a formal response from the Trump administration.
The administration had not issued one as of Sunday morning.
The silence is notable. the United States National
Intelligence Council added a sobering dimension to the
strategic picture on Saturday with a leak of an internal
assessment to the Washington Post.
The report found that a large scale American LED assault on
Iran was unlikely to topple the country's government.
It described the prospect of Iran's fragmented opposition
taking control of the country is unlikely.
This assessment directly contradicts the public framing
of Operation Epic Fury as an operation designed to produce
regime change and a new American acceptable supreme leader.
The Trump administration characterized the leak as a
political act CIA Director John Ratcliffe pushed back, saying
new information indicated severe damage to Iran's nuclear
facilities that would take years to rebuild.
The public contradiction between the National Intelligence
Council's assessment and the CIA director's counter statement
illustrates the degree to which the United States intelligence
community is not speaking with one voice about what this
operation will actually achieve. Human Rights Watch issued a
formal statement on Saturday calling for an investigation
into the min of school airstrike as a potential war crime.
The organization said the attack on the primary school in
southern Iran, which killed at least 160 people, many of them
schoolchildren, should be investigated as a war crime
under international humanitarian law.
An Al Jazeera investigation separately found that the
targeting of the school was likely deliberate.
The New York Times reported that the strike may have been carried
out by the United States. Iran's government says 180
children were killed. The Pentagon says it is
investigating. Once a major human rights
organization formally uses the phrase war crime in connection
with a specific event in a specific conflict, the legal and
reputational consequences become very difficult to contain.
Amazon Web Services disclosed on Saturday that its data center in
Bahrain was damaged by a nearby Iranian drone strike.
Two AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates were
directly struck by Iranian drones and remain offline.
Iran's Fars news agency stated that Amazon's facilities were
targeted specifically for the company's support of United
States military and intelligence activities.
Amazon Web Services is the dominant provider of cloud
computing infrastructure for the United States government,
including for classified military and intelligence
systems. The deliberate targeting of
commercial technology infrastructure with direct ties
to American military capability is a new dimension of this
conflict that has received less attention than it deserves.
AWS data centers do not have air defenses.
They are soft targets and their disruption has real consequences
for American military command and control systems that depend
on commercial cloud infrastructure.
A water desalina tion plant in Bahrain was struck and damaged
by an Iranian drone attack, Bahrain's Ministry of Interior
confirmed on Sunday. A desalina tion plant is
civilian infrastructure of the most fundamental kind in a Gulf
state where almost all drinking water comes from desalina tion.
It's deliberate Targeting, if deliberate, would constitute an
attack on the civilian water supply of a country not formally
at war with Iran. Bahrain is the host nation for
the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet.
Iran's framing is that it is striking American military
infrastructure and the countries that host it.
Brains framing and the framing of international humanitarian
law is rather different. Israel struck oil storage and
refining facilities inside Iran for the first time on Saturday.
ACNN team on the ground witnessed thick black plumes of
smoke rising from the Sharon oil deposit in northeast Tehran, one
of Iran's largest fuel storage facilities.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed on Sunday that the
United States has no plans to target Iran's oil industry, its
natural gas industry or any of its energy infrastructure.
He said the United States is targeting 0 energy
infrastructure. He acknowledged that Israel has
struck local fuel storage sites inside Iran, describing them as
local fuel depots. He attempted to downplay the air
quality impacts on Iranian civilians by saying a few days
of lower air quality in Tehran is nothing compared to what the
Iranian people suffered under the regime.
That statement was not well received internationally.
The global economic picture on Sunday continues to deteriorate.
Brent crude reached $91.00 a barrel on Friday, its highest
level since October 2023. In one week of war, Brent crude
climbed 27%, the biggest weekly gain since the COVID-19 pandemic
in 2020. United States domestic oil
prices surged 31% in a single week.
Diesel prices are rising faster than petrol prices because
diesel was already in shorter supply.
Lloyd's of London confirmed it is engaging with the Trump
administration following Trump's announcement that he is ordering
the United States International Development Finance Corporation
to offer political risk insurance for maritime trade
through the Gulf. Ship traffic through the Strait
of Hormuz has come to a near complete halt. 150 freight
ships, including many oil tankers, remain stalled at or
near the Strait. Political risk insurance does
not stop a missile. The White House confirmed it has
no timeline for when the Strait of Hormuz will be safe for oil
tankers. Trump was asked directly on
Saturday when the war would end. He said it would continue for a
little while. He said it was going
unbelievably good for the United States military.
He dismissed threats from Ali Larijani, who had posted that
Trump must pay the price. He signaled the United States
could broaden its target list further.
Trump also participated on Saturday in one of the most
solemn duties of the American presidency.
He attended the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base
in Delaware. Of the six American service
members killed in the opening days of the conflict, the six
were Captain Cottier Cork, 35 years old, Sergeant First Class
Noah Lt. Ends, 42, Sergeant First Class
Nicole M Amour, 39, Sergeant Declan J Cody, 20 years old,
Major Jeffrey O'Brien, 45, and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert M
Marzen. Trump was joined by first lady
Melania Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth and Middle East
envoy Steve Witkoff. The president saluted as members
of the United States Army Carry team moved each flag draped
transfer case from the transport aircraft.
Six Americans, 6 names, six families.
The human cost of this conflict made visible and personal at
Dover. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu issued a statement on Saturday that encapsulated the
Israeli government's framing of this entire conflict.
He said Israel is continuing with full force.
He said the alliance with the United States is deeper than
ever. He said Israel and America are
changing the face of the Middle East.
He said that after October 7th he had decided to lead what he
called a polar shift, actions that dramatically alter the
balance of power between Israel and its enemies.
He described the joint operation with the United States as
removing the threat of Iran's ballistic and nuclear
capabilities. The question of what comes next
hangs over everything the National Intelligence Council
says. Regime change is unlikely.
The IRGC has just installed a hard line successor who has
spent his career funding Israel's enemies.
Trump has said the new Supreme Leader is unacceptable.
Iran has launched its 27th wave of strikes.
Human Rights Watch is calling for war crimes investigations.
A water desalina tion plant has been struck.
Amazon Web Services data centers are offline.
Brent crude is at a 7 month high.
Lloyd's of London is negotiating political risk insurance for the
Strait of Hormuz. In a Dover Air Force Base. 6
flag draped caskets were carried off a transport aircraft while
the President of the United States stood and saluted.
Day 9. The new Supreme Leader of Iran
is the son of the man America killed and this war has no end.
Insight. That is episode 9 of Epic Fury,
the US Iran War podcast. The story is moving fast.
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