Mojtaba Khamenei

Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei (born 8 September 1969) is an Iranian Shia cleric who was named the third supreme leader of Iran in March 2026. A member of the Khamenei family, he is the second child and son of the previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Born in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, he was nine when his father emerged as a leading figure in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79. He received early education in Sardasht and Mahabad, and graduated high school from Tehran, after which he studied Islamic theology under the guidance of his father and Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. He joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 1987 and served in the Iran–Iraq War. In 1999 he continued his studies in Qom to become a cleric, and joined the Qom Seminary as a theological teacher afterwards. He took control of the Basij paramilitary volunteer militia in 2009.

Following the assassination of his father during the 2026 Iran war, which also killed one of his sisters and his wife, Mojtaba was elected as the third supreme leader by Iran's Assembly of Experts; however, his prolonged absence from public view after the appointment raised confusion over his fate. He has previously been sanctioned by the United States Department of the Treasury in 2019 as part of their policy of sanctioning individuals linked to Ali Khamenei.

In political ideology and jurisprudence, he is considered to be among the most hardline of the Iranian principlists, and has close ties to some of the "most ideologically extremist clerics" according to a report from the Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank. Analysts have generally seen him as more open to developing an Iranian nuclear weapons program than his father, opposing his predecessor's fatwa against nuclear weapons.