Is Mojtaba Khamenei alive? Is he in a coma? Have you lost a leg? What we know and what we don’t about Iran’s new supreme leader

In any case, Khamenei Jr.’s days are numbered, as he has made clear Benjamin Netanyahu: “We eliminated the old tyrant. And the new puppet of the Revolutionary Guards cannot show his face in public.” The Israeli leader had already threatened after the father’s elimination to do the same with all Iranian leaders.

On the fourth day of his supposed mandate and the thirteenth day of the war, the regime’s media broadcast its first statement to the Iranian people, promising revenge and the continuation of the struggle and resistance. But he did not read it, but rather a state television presenter.

Meanwhile, Iran maintains its counteroffensive with missiles and drones against the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and strangles the Strait of Hormuz, with serious consequences for the world economy. Israel and the United States continue to hit Iranian targets and, although Donald Trump He is already beginning to announce his victory, it is not clear how he intends to get out of this war or why he started it.

Mojtaba Khamenei was named supreme leader on March 8, and neither before nor since has he been seen in public. He did not attend the funerals of his father and the rest of the regime’s leadership, nor did he attend his own inauguration: in his place a cardboard cutout with his image was displayed. No recent video or photograph has been released.

His election has been read as a provocation to Trump and Netanyahu: he represents the hard line, maintains close ties with the Revolutionary Guard and the opposition describes him as a dark and crueler figure than his father. Furthermore, according to publications this week, it accumulates hundreds of millions of euros in real estate investments in Europe, including Spain.

The big question is whether the new supreme leader is alive, injured or dead.

According to Israeli intelligence, Mojtaba suffered leg injuries in the same attack that killed his father and other family members, and Iranian television has referred to him as janbaza term reserved for wounded war veterans.

Opposition groups in the diaspora have pointed to The Guardian who is in a coma and is being treated secretly in a hospital.

According to Kaveh Nematipouractivist and political analyst, there is no solid information or additional verifiable data, although much of what is circulating could be true. In any case, he maintains that he is already “underground” and that “I honestly don’t think he’s going to come out, because he knows that the moment he knows where he is, he’s a dead man,” he explains to this newspaper.

“No one can truly govern Iran if they do not control the airspace,” now in the hands of the United States and Israel. The new leader, he adds, “barely exists above ground anymore” and can only survive in hiding.

Nematipour believed before his election that Mojtaba would be reserved as a medium-term card, because any new leader is today a declared target. “My theory was that the next leader was going to be someone on the rebound, someone temporary, but I was wrong. The regime is burning cards ahead of schedule and even using someone as bait,” he says.

This analyst also believes that the war will hardly be resolved from the air alone and sees a ground invasion as increasingly likely: “If someone wants to end this, they have to put boots on the ground.”

In his opinion, Tehran has no incentive to negotiate now, because it believes that the contacts have only served to buy Washington time and that a ground war could inflict enough casualties to force Washington to agree.

But there is still no faith of life. “Nobody knows, it is a possibility,” he tells EL ESPAÑOL Daniel BashandehSpanish-Iranian geopolitical analyst. “But it is not the leader himself that is the key; it is the military.” According to his analysis, it is the Guards who really rule and the supreme leader functions largely as a theological cover for their power.

The uncertainty over Mojtaba, Bashandeh continues, is an opportunity for greater militarization of Iran: “There is still no public appearance. The military wing, the Pasdaran, has prioritized the continuity of Khamenei’s legacy to maintain cohesion and face the war of resistance.”

It is the military leadership that controls the times of war, internal politics and the story of continuity. “It is very important; that is why they are trying to lengthen the surname Khamenei,” he points out.

With top generals dead, Iranian forces have resorted to a “mosaic defense” strategy that delegates power to local commanders, raising further questions about how much authority Khamenei actually wields.

And the clearest proof of the leadership vacuum, according to this reading, was that the Iranian president, Masud Pezeshkianordered to stop attacks on neighboring countries, but the drones and missiles continued to be launched. The Guards do not obey the president, nor perhaps an injured supreme leader.

In light of this evidence, the question arises as to why Mojtaba was invested. Hamidreza Azizione of the most prestigious Iranists, has published in Iran Analytica an explanation of the conditions that led to his rise.

For Azizi, what was decisive was not so much the name as the fact that the succession was resolved quickly under the pressure of war. Mojtaba arrived not because of a carefully designed dynasty, but because of an emergency logic.

For years, the succession after Ali Jamenei It remained ambiguous: several names were mentioned, but none combined with its clerical authority, ideological weight, and institutional influence.

This lack of definition made it possible to negotiate between factions and even explore alternatives, but the war eliminated that margin.

With the country under attack, internal legitimacy collapsed after massive protests and brutal repression—according to HRNA, more than 7,000 dead—and the supreme arbiter of the system gone, prolonging uncertainty became a strategic risk.

The priority thus shifted to restoring a clear center of authority as soon as possible. Azizi cites the case of Pezeshkian: his conciliatory statements were immediately rectified by military commanders and other elites, which showed the extent to which the lack of a unifying authority generated noise in the midst of war.

At the same time, the Assembly of Experts not only had to choose a successor, but also decide whether to preserve intact the architecture of the Islamic Republic or initiate a structural transformation.

But the alternatives—collective leadership, a symbolic figure with actual command of the security apparatus, a transition toward a more militarized system—required time, negotiation, and perhaps constitutional changes.

None of them fit the war urgency, so the regime opted for the safest route: preserving the institution of the supreme leader and the doctrine of velayat-e faqihby which the government should fall to Islamic jurists.

Mojtaba benefited from that closure. His name had been circulating for years, although under normal conditions his candidacy was problematic because family succession clashed with the ideological legitimacy proclaimed by the Islamic Republic since Ruhollah Khomeini.

However, he offered something that few could: intimate knowledge of the supreme leader’s office, deep insertion into the bureaucratic networks built by his father, and lasting ties with key sectors of the security apparatus. For Azizi, that practical capital outweighed the lack of clerical authority comparable to that of other candidates.

The final irony, Azizi emphasizes, is that the pressure from the United States and Israel could favor precisely the outcome that harmed them the most: the war compressed the decision, raised the value of continuity in the face of any transformation and, instead of opening the system, pushed it to close even more on itself.

In that line, Rob Geist Pinfolda professor at King’s College London, has pointed out that this replacement contradicts the rhetoric that the Trump Administration expected to hear from the new supreme leader.

Y Maha Yahyadirector of the Carnegie Middle East Center, maintains that real power remains operational and that Mojtaba’s election sends a clear message to Trump: military pressure will not make them change their position.

In any case, what Trump has achieved is to reinforce the Revolutionary Guards as the most powerful institution in Iran. The Pasdaran control politics, the military and the economy.

The decisive factor for the country’s future will be the internal struggles within the armed wing of the Islamic Republic, with or without a fully operational supreme leader, he explained. Karim Sadjadpourfrom Carnegie. The person in front matters less than the apparatus that surrounds them.

Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei remains in his bunker. If he goes out and is assassinated, “the moral impact for the regime would be devastating,” Nematipour considers. And the question is no longer just whether he is injured, in a coma or in hiding, but what kind of country and regime he will have left to govern if the war results in agonizing survival, an internal implosion or an even greater militarization of power.