“I assure everyone that we will not forgo vengeance for the blood of your martyrs,” Ayatollah Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s new ‘Leader of the Revolution’ (Rahbar Enghelab), said on March 12, in his first public comment after his elevation to the country’s most powerful office. “The vengeance we have in mind is not limited to the martyrdom of the great leader of the Revolution,” the 56-year-old cleric said, referring to the assassination of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28 by a U.S.-Israeli joint strike. “Rather, every member of the nation who is martyred by the enemy constitutes an independent subject in the file of vengeance,” he said in a statement issued in Farsi.
The younger Khamenei was at Ali Khamenei’s residence in Tehran when it was struck on the first day of the ongoing war. He lost his father, who had been Iran’s rahbar for 37 years, as well as his mother and his wife, along with other top officials of the Islamic Republic. “He [Mojtaba] was there, and he was injured in his legs and hand and arm... in the bombardment,” Iran’s Ambassador to Cyprus, Alireza Salarian, later said. Yousef Pezeshkian, son of President Masoud Pezeshkian, wrote in a social media post on March 11 that Mojtaba was injured “but safe and sound”.
