Earlier this month, Iranian state media did one thing it had by no means finished earlier than.
Mehr Information, an outlet managed by the nation’s Islamic Growth Group, launched a video titled “First Photos of the Chief,” displaying Supreme Chief Mojtaba Khamenei addressing a small group of scholars. The footage was undated. It got here, nonetheless, days after Israeli retailers reported the 56-year-old cleric was in “extraordinarily essential situation,” and it seems to have finished little to settle the query consuming Iran’s political class: is anybody truly working the nation proper now.
The clip echoed an identical undated video IRIB launched in March, displaying Khamenei educating spiritual sciences. President Masoud Pezeshkian acknowledged this week that reaching him has been “very troublesome,” although he described their final alternate as constructive.
A number of sources near Pezeshkian’s administration instructed IranWire that no cupboard minister has met with Khamenei for the reason that February 28 strike that killed his father, Ali Khamenei, and that officers “wouldn’t be stunned” to listen to information of his loss of life.
Iranian authorities have repeatedly denied he’s incapacitated. However the man now holding life-tenure authority over Iran’s armed forces, judiciary and clerical institution hasn’t spoken publicly, delivered a sermon, or appeared unedited on digital camera since taking the publish in March.
“The principle situation for U.S. policymakers — particularly any president — is whether or not the brand new management in Iran, or any management we are able to at present anticipate, is prone to depart materially from the strategic insurance policies of the earlier management,” Norman Roule, a former CIA officer who spent 34 years managing packages associated to Iran and the Center East, tells The Cipher Transient. “The proof thus far suggests no basic break.”
The vacuum on the high didn’t keep empty for lengthy.
A Management Rebuilt By way of Killings
The cascade started on February 28, when a joint U.S.-Israeli strike killed longstanding chief Ali Khamenei together with Mohammad Pakpour, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commander-in-chief, and a string of different senior officers. An interim management council, made up of Pezeshkian, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei and cleric Alireza Arafi, held the state collectively for lower than per week earlier than the Meeting of Specialists named Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s third Supreme Chief on March 8.
The selection was uncommon on its face. The Islamic Republic was based on the overthrow of hereditary monarchy, but its clerical institution had simply put in the son of the person he changed. Mojtaba lacked the spiritual credentials sometimes required of a Supreme Chief. He was broadly considered a hojatoleslam, a mid-ranking cleric, fairly than an ayatollah — but he had spent almost 20 years as his father’s gatekeeper and loved deep loyalty contained in the Revolutionary Guard.
President Trump, who had labeled him “unacceptable” through the struggle, later instructed Fox Information that the succession was not one his personal father had needed, including, “their management is gone, their second management is gone, now their third management is in bother.”
Roule, nonetheless, cautions towards studying the brand new bench as a break from what got here earlier than it. Most of Iran’s present leaders, he notes, “rose inside establishments formed by Ali Khamenei and have been trusted, promoted, or formed inside, and by the system he developed over years of rule.”
Roule factors to the generational math: Pezeshkian, Mohsen Rezaee and Ali Reza Zolghadr have been about 25 years previous on the time of the 1979 revolution; Ahmad Vahidi was 21; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Sadeq Amoli Larijani round 18; Mojtaba Khamenei simply 10.
“For this group, the 1979 Revolution remained the ideological basis of the system, however the Iran-Iraq Warfare and the post-2003 marketing campaign for regional affect have been extra necessary skilled experiences,” Roule explains. “Most are veterans of the Iran-Iraq Warfare or have been straight formed by it.”
The present command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has adopted the identical brutal sample.
Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Guard’s aerospace power, was killed in a strike in June 2025. Pakpour, who had succeeded Hajizadeh’s predecessor Hossein Salami, was killed on the outset of the U.S.-Israeli marketing campaign in February. His successor, Ahmad Vahidi, a Quds Pressure founder and former inside minister with an Interpol crimson discover tied to the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, was formally put in as commander-in-chief on March 1.
Unverified experiences of Vahidi’s personal loss of life circulated in Tehran in late Might and once more in early June; Iranian, Israeli or American officers have confirmed none, and Vahidi continues to be listed because the IRGC’s lively chief.
A Crackdown That Matches the Second
The uncertainty on the high has coincided with a pointy rise in executions and threatened executions, months after the January protests that shook the regime.
Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science, says the struggle and the unrest have compounded one another fairly than one driving the opposite alone.
“The protests and the struggle have fueled — it’s like placing a little bit little bit of an accelerant into one thing that’s already fairly flammable,” Sarat tells The Cipher Transient. “The protests have been, I feel, rather more set off than the struggle itself. The struggle has simply offered one more excuse, as a result of it’s jacked up nationalist fervor.”
Sarat is skeptical that outdoors strain, together with previous White Home rhetoric threatening penalties over executions, has had a lot bearing on Tehran’s calculus.
“The administration has stated nothing about human rights abuses, not to mention execution practices around the globe,” he says, underscoring that any outdoors leverage is extra prone to come from Europe than Washington. He views the surge itself as a well-known survival tactic for a management nonetheless discovering its footing.
“It’s not a type of unfamiliar tactic for a regime new to energy to wish to flex its muscle and terrorize the inhabitants,” he observes. “This can be a survival second, and they’ll do what they’ll do to protect the important character of their regime.”
The Guard Consolidates Across the Vacuum
With the youthful Khamenei largely unseen, the Revolutionary Guard didn’t sit on its palms. It moved quick, filling high posts by official decrees.
Together with Vahidi, the Supreme Chief’s workplace named Mostafa Izadi as deputy IRGC commander, Ali Azmaei to go the IRGC Navy and Hossein Taeb to steer the Basij paramilitary power, filling six senior navy posts vacated by wartime deaths.
Mohsen Rezaee, who commanded the IRGC from 1981 to 1997, was individually appointed because the Supreme Chief’s consultant on the Supreme Nationwide Safety Council. This publish opened up, based on Rose Kelanic, director of the Center East Program at Protection Priorities, after Zolghadr was pushed out.
Kelanic argues the reshuffle quantities to greater than a personnel change.
“Mojtaba Khamenei’s position seems to be that of a figurehead and potential scapegoat, having fun with far much less authority than his father, whom he changed,” Kelanic tells The Cipher Transient. “The true energy rests with Ghalibaf, Vahidi and Rezaee, who’re all profession IRGC officers, which functionally implies that Iranian authorities authority has shifted even farther from civilian management to navy management.”
That shift, she continues, carries its personal danger for any settlement with Washington.
“When navy leaders assume management as heads of state in wartime, they have an inclination to make worst-case assumptions about adversaries’ intentions, view compromise as weak spot, and favor offensive navy methods over defensive ones,” Kelanic factors out.
Roule, in the meantime, frames the Guard’s rise in institutional fairly than private phrases, and says the struggle has widened fairly than preserved its attain. Estimates of how a lot of Iran’s financial system the IRGC touches “range broadly — roughly from a fifth to a 3rd,” he says, relying on whether or not one counts solely straight managed corporations or additionally affiliated holding corporations, pension funds and sanctions-evasion networks.
“A greater approach to consider the IRGC just isn’t merely as a navy group with industrial pursuits, however as a central actor in a state-security-economic community,” Roule notes.
Ghalibaf’s Quiet Climb to the Middle
The opposite determine benefiting from the uncertainty on the high is Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and former IRGC commander who has spent the struggle years turning what’s historically a legislative publish into one thing nearer to a shadow international ministry.
Ghalibaf, a two-time presidential also-ran who trailed Pezeshkian within the first spherical of the 2024 election, has emerged as Tehran’s principal interlocutor within the oblique talks with Washington, serving concurrently as Iran’s particular envoy to China and as a bridge between the political and military-security institutions that Pezeshkian, a doctor by coaching with no roots within the safety providers, has struggled to command.
Parliament re-elected Ghalibaf to a seventh consecutive time period as speaker in late Might, with 235 of 271 votes forged, as experiences circulated of friction between Pezeshkian and the brand new Supreme Chief’s workplace. Judiciary chief Mohseni-Ejei congratulated Ghalibaf on the vote by calling him a “tireless and battle-hardened jihadist chief” who had waged jihad “each within the area and in diplomacy” through the struggle.
Roule warns towards studying Ghalibaf’s prominence as a proper energy seize.
“His present prominence shouldn’t be confused with basic supremacy over Pezeshkian,” he says. “Pezeshkian nonetheless stays president, heads the manager department, and formally chairs the Supreme Nationwide Safety Council. There isn’t a proof that Ghalibaf has assumed any of the presidency’s basic constitutional authorities.”
His affect, Roule highlights, “is finest understood as issue-specific energy produced by circumstances, his political standing, longstanding IRGC relationships, and wartime delegation.”
Who Really Holds the Reins
What emerges from the previous 5 months of battle, nonetheless, is a regime ruled much less by the clerical hierarchy that has outlined the Islamic Republic since 1979 than by an overlapping wartime trio.
A Supreme Chief whose authority is formally absolute however whose bodily capability to train it stays unverified. An IRGC command construction rebuilt twice over by assassination and now working with large latitude, alongside a parliament speaker who has transformed legislative standing into real diplomatic weight.
Nonetheless, Roule sees continuity because the almost definitely consequence even when Mojtaba’s well being worsens additional.
“If Mojtaba Khamenei turns into significantly incapacitated or dies, the almost definitely consequence absent a profitable mass rebellion or a serious elite fracture is continuity fairly than reversal on the problems of biggest concern to america,” he says. “The IRGC would stay a central energy middle, and the system has constitutional procedures for interim management and number of a successor.”
He additionally factors out that if Mojtaba’s loss of life have been tied to the struggle, “the state would nearly actually use a martyrdom narrative to strengthen regime legitimacy and resistance.”
Kelanic is much less sanguine about what that continuity means for diplomacy. Iran, she stresses, may even develop tougher to barter with just because energy is now cut up amongst rivals fairly than concentrated in a single workplace, leaving Washington and not using a clear handle for any deal.
“The IRGC’s strengthened rule over a weaker civilian management makes reaching a peace deal tougher,” Kelanic provides, “which is one among some ways the Iran Warfare has backfired.”
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