Mojtaba Khamenei: gatekeeper to Iran's supreme leader

Iran's supreme leader's second son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has emerged as one of the driving forces behind the government's crackdown, diplomats and observers said.

Mojtaba is an ally of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the disputed president, and was credited with winning his father's endorsement for the then Tehran mayor in the 2005 elections, leading to Ahmadinejad's shock second round victory.

Mojtaba is an austere figure, generally seen as more hardline than his father and has become a gatekeeper for access to the beit-e-rahbari, the supreme leader's home, and the supreme leader himself.

According to some Iran analysts, Khamenei, 70, is manoeuvring to position his son as his successor.

Formally, the position is supposed to be awarded by the assembly of experts, an elected group of clerics led by the most powerful rival to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, Hashemi Rafsanjani.

But the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, had a powerful say on who his successor should be.

Khamenei has been increasingly described in the official media as the "Ali of our times", a reference to Ali, the Shia imam who passed on the position to his son Hassan.

"There has been a lot of talk lately that this is all about Mojtaba and the succession," said Ali Ansari, an Iran analyst at St Andrews University.

"He may be securing the position for the long term, and protecting it. The argument is that he is protecting his future."

sidebar from 2003:

Hardline vigilantes in Iran beat up students in their beds inside dormitories
www.canada.com/ | Saturday, June 14, 2003
Posted on 06/14/2003 8:23:50 AM PDT by Walkin Man
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/929032/posts

[snip] The dorm attacks followed overnight clashes between hundreds of pro-cleric militants and security forces with Iranians throughout the capital. Friday’s standoffs were the most intense and widespread of four consecutive nights of protests in Tehran, which were sparked by university students and snowballed into broader displays of opposition to Iran’s clerical establishment... Unlike previous nights, no protests against supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were seen... Protesters had been calling for an end to the country’s hardline establishment and for supreme leader Khamenei’s death. Criticism of Khamenei is usually punished by imprisonment, and public calls for his death had been unheard of until this week. Khamenei’s hardline supporters, who control key government institutions in Iran, are locked in a power struggle with popularly elected President Mohammad Khatami, who came to power aiming to reform Iran’s conservative political system... During a Friday prayer sermon at Tehran University, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, a key Khamenei supporter, urged Iran’s youth not to fall into what he described as a U.S. trap by denouncing the country’s political leadership... While the recent protests seemed to be disorganized, with no clear leaders, some demonstrators vowed to keep up the pressure until next month’s anniversary of the much larger and violent protests in 1999... when security forces and extremist supporters of hardline clerics attacked pro-democracy demonstrators after a student dormitory was stormed. The dormitory raid led to the death of at least one student and generated the worst street battles since the 1979 Islamic Revolution... Iran, which Washington accuses of hiding a nuclear weapons program and harbouring terrorists... [end]

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