Iranian officials’ recent comments about Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei are aimed at showing he remains in charge and will ultimately decide whether Tehran accepts a deal with the United States to end the war, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
The report said officials had begun speaking more openly about Khamenei’s condition amid speculations that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards were effectively running decision-making.
“They are projecting that there’s no change . . . the supreme leader was the apex of the system and is still the apex,” Vali Nasr, a former US official and professor at Johns Hopkins University was quoted as saying. “And that he’s alive, functioning and in control.”
He added that the guards were also seeking to project that “they are not running the show and [Khamenei is] not just a figurehead.”
The report referred to remarks by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and Mazaher Hosseini, a senior official in the Supreme Leader’s office.
Pezeshkian said on earlier this month that he had met with the Supreme Leader, offering a first public account of him meeting Mojtaba Khamenei since he suffered severe wounds at the start of the Iran war on February 28.
Hosseini said later that Mojtaba Khamenei suffered minor injuries to his kneecap, back and behind his ear in the airstrikes that killed his father and wife, insisting he is now in “full health” and dismissing reports of a serious head injury as “lies.”
