The United States still has not seen or verified Iranian Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei’s current condition, now more than two weeks after he was named as the successor to his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Donald Trump said on Monday.
Mojtaba Khamenei is believed to have been severely injured during the initial attacks in the U.S.-Israel-Iran war that killed his father, but he has not been seen publicly since then, with broadcasters reading statements purportedly from him instead of direct addresses to the masses.
“Nobody heard of the second supreme leader, the son. We have not heard from the son. Every once in a while, you see a statement made, but we don’t know if he’s living,” Trump said on Monday.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said earlier this month the younger Khamenei was “wounded and likely disfigured” in the strikes that killed his father on Feb. 28, while Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers last week that he was “very severely” injured, though she also noted that the regime is largely “intact, but degraded.”
The younger Khamenei has strong ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and he was involved in the recent crackdowns on nationwide protests prior to the war, Gabbard said.
The question of who is leading Iran during the conflict is a significant unknown, considering Trump revealed on Monday that the U.S. and Iran have had talks lately about de-escalation. In his comments on Monday, the president declined to specify whom the U.S. was negotiating with from the Iranian side, but said the individual is a “top person.” There has been reporting that they are talking to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
“The people that seem to be running it, and they seem that based on really fact, because things they’ve said have taken place,” Trump added.
A senior anonymous official in Tehran, meanwhile, denied the talks had taken place.
“Trump backed down from attacking critical infrastructure as Iran’s military threats became credible. Financial market pressure and the threat of bonds within the U.S. and the West have increased, and this has been another important factor in this retreat,” the senior official told Iran’s Fars News Agency in translated remarks.
The negotiations came amid Trump’s threat over the weekend to target Iran’s power plants if they do not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a vital waterway for oil shipments that has largely been shut down since the war began negatively impacting the global economy — while an Iranian military spokesman said that Iran would respond to any attacks on its energy and fuel infrastructure by targeting U.S.-linked energy facilities in the region.
Israel’s military has killed several senior Iranian leaders during the war, including the elder Khamenei, national security secretary Ali Larijani, commander of the Guard’s Basij unit Gholamreza Soleimani, and top Iranian intelligence official Esmaeil Khatib.
Israel’s leadership has made regime change a goal of the war, whereas the Trump administration has not specifically articulated it as an objective. The distinction could become more significant amid the negotiations, where it’s unclear whether Israel would abide by a deal to end the war between the U.S. and Iran and whether Iran would stop attacks on Israel and the Gulf States if the deal were exclusively made with the Americans.
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Shortly after announcing the negotiations were taking place, Israel’s air force announced it had begun another wave of strikes targeting infrastructure in Iran.
Trump said he didn’t want to share who the U.S. is negotiating with because he doesn’t “want him to be killed.”
