Iran’s rulers have a problem as they attempt to negotiate an end to the war: Their new supreme leader is noticeably MIA and silent on the talks.
U.S. and Iranian officials say Mojtaba Khamenei was severely injured in a February airstrike, which killed his wife, son and father, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Since then, the only thing Iranians have heard or seen from their new leader are messages purportedly written by him and images that appeared to be modified or generated by artificial intelligence.
His absence is becoming a bigger problem for Tehran as it tries to negotiate an end to the war. Iran’s rulers have shown unity during the fighting, coordinating their political messaging and maintaining command and control over their armed forces. But they are fracturing over how far to go to strike a deal with the U.S.
Khamenei’s protracted absence from the public eye has been particularly unsettling for his hard-line supporters who are questioning the legitimacy of the talks, said Arash Azizi, a historian and lecturer at Yale University who focuses on Iran and has reviewed group chats of hard-line regime supporters.
Iran’s hard-liners have taken aim at more moderate Iranian politicians who are playing a prominent role in talks—most notably parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who they see as too compromising.
“They wonder about where he is,” Azizi said of the new supreme leader. “They’re dismayed by what they see as Ghalibaf and the team leading the National Security Council negotiating and giving too many concessions to the U.S.”
Some hard-line supporters of the regime have posted messages on social media asking Khamenei to at least release a voice message declaring his support for the talks.
In the past, Iran’s supreme leader has been the final arbiter of major national security decisions. Khamenei’s two predecessors often went public about the direction they wanted the country to take, acting as referees between squabbling factions.
To end the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime’s first supreme leader, made the difficult call to end the fighting, a decision he likened to drinking from a poisoned chalice. Khamenei’s father, Ali Khamenei, publicly approved of talks that led to a 2015 pact with global powers to ease sanctions in exchange for nuclear curbs before nodding to the deal itself.
The Iranian government hasn’t released new images of Mojtaba Khamenei. All of the official images of him—including the profile picture on his X account and the massive propaganda billboards on display on the streets of Tehran—appeared to be generated or modified by AI.
Iranian officials haven’t even released a voice recording of their new leader—as the former supreme leader sometimes did when his security was at risk. Many Iranians wonder if he is even alive.
Iranian officials said Khamenei has been keeping a low profile for his own safety. Before the cease-fire, Israel systematically targeted and killed top Iranian officials, and Khamenei remains high on their kill list.
On Thursday, for the first time, a senior Iranian official publicly acknowledged meeting the new supreme leader. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he recently held a 2-½-hour meeting with Khamenei, in a public message that appeared aimed at dispelling questions about whether the new leader is indeed alive and running the country.
“Pezeshkian is trying to convince both the regime’s opposition and its supporters that Mojtaba is hiding for his security, and not because he is dead. This is important because the Islamic Republic is working on a deal,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security forces and an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Late Friday, an Iranian official detailed Khamenei’s injuries for the first time, saying his kneecap and back had been wounded in the strike that killed his father. The official insisted he was in good health.
“The enemy is trying, through various pretexts, to obtain an audio or video recording of him in order to misuse it,” Mazaher Hosseini, a senior official in the office of Iran’s supreme leader, said in a video posted by the Nour news agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. ”At the appropriate time, he himself will speak to all of you.”
The public statements have done little to dispel the impression that Khamenei remains too unwell to play an active role in the day-to-day running of the country. Pezeshkian’s statement focused on the style of the interaction more than on the substance of what was discussed, and it didn’t say when or where the meeting occurred.
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com