After Khamenei, Who Could Lead Iran Next?

Who could come next after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran is a question on many minds but with no clear answer.

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Even U.S. President Donald Trump admitted that his Administration had ideas about potential successors to the Iranian leader—but they were also killed in the attacks.

“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told ABC News Sunday. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

Read More: ‘It’s As If I’m Dreaming’: Iranians Recount the First Day of the War, and the Death of Khamenei

Trump added to ABC News that someone from the Iranian government has since reached out to him, although Iran’s top security official Ali Larijani refuted that suggestion with a post on Monday, declaring: “We will not negotiate with the United States.”

Khamenei reportedly began making preparations for a successor while sheltering during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel last June. According to the New York Times, Khamenei’s top picks to succeed him were his chief of staff Ali Asghar Hejazi, whom Israel told the Times on Saturday that it killed, although Tehran has not yet confirmed his death; Supreme Court Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i; and Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Trump told Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich on Sunday that 48 senior Iranian leaders were killed in the U.S.-Israeli bombings.

According to Iran’s constitution, the Supreme Leader must be a Shia Islamic jurist chosen by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member elected committee of clerics. In the meantime, a temporary council led by President Masoud Pezeshkian, Mohseni-Eje’i, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, a jurist appointed from the Guardian Council, will oversee the country per its constitution, according to Iranian news outlets.

But the question of transition comes at a pivotal moment for Iran as the country reels from widespread domestic unrest and faces sustained U.S. and Israeli military attacks aimed at collapsing the revolutionary order that has been in place since 1979.

Read More: Trump Calls Khamenei’s Death ‘Justice for the People of Iran’

While anything may still happen, especially as the war escalates following Iran’s retaliatory attacks across the Gulf and on U.S. military bases, here’s what to know about some known contenders for Iran’s next Supreme Leader.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i has served as the head of Iran’s judiciary since Khamenei appointed him in July 2021. The 69-year-old, who is also a senior jurist, has held a number of other official positions, including serving as intelligence minister from 2005 to 2009, prosecutor-general from 2009 to 2014, and first deputy chief justice from 2014 to 2021.

Mohseni-Eje’i is widely seen as a hardline conservative. The U.S. State Department and the European Union sanctioned him in 2011 for his role in crushing protests in support of the political opposition after the 2009 presidential election. According to the sanction decision by the E.U., intelligence agents under Mohseni-Eje’i’s command detained, tortured, and coerced false confessions from hundreds of activists, journalists, dissidents and reformist political figures.

As millions of people took to the streets of Iran after the rial plunged, Mohseni-Eje’i vowed to show “no leniency” to protestors and called for expedited trials and executions. He also accused the U.S. and Israel of having “openly and explicitly supported the unrest” in Iran.

Hassan Khomeini

Hassan Khomeini is the grandson of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic who oversaw the 1979 revolution. While Khomeini, a cleric, has not held public office, he is considered a potential successor given his reformist views and his lineage.

After the June strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Reuters reported that Khomeini had already emerged as a frontrunner to succeed Khamenei. Amid conflict with the U.S. then, five insiders told Reuters that Khomeini, who reportedly commands respect among the IRGC and Iran’s senior clerics, could represent a more moderate Iran compared to Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba. Iran International reported that in May last year, Khomeini, at the mausoleum of his late grandfather, said: “Sometimes dignity is born through war, and sometimes through holding firm in the field of negotiation.”

Khomeini’s close links to reformists, who have for decades tried—but failed—to open Iran up, resulted in Khomeini being barred from running for a seat at Iran’s top clerical body, the Assembly of Experts, back in 2016. The body manages the Supreme Leader and ensures that he continues to qualify as one, lest they remove him.

Mojtaba Khamenei

Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s second-eldest son. Bloomberg reported in January that Motjaba Khamenei oversees an investment empire, with unnamed sources saying he has access to Swiss bank accounts and British luxury property worth more than $100 million, despite U.S. sanctions imposed on him back in 2019.  

Khamenei’s son, who has largely avoided the public eye and has not held government office, is also believed to wield massive influence, including on Iran’s administrators and one of the country’s most powerful organizations, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as the Basij volunteer paramilitary force.

But the fact that Mojtaba Khamenei is the Supreme Leader’s son may work against him: a father-to-son succession in the Shiite Muslim clerical establishment may spark outrage. Khamenei had already indicated opposition to his son’s candidacy, an Iranian source close to his office told Reuters in 2024, adding that the leader did not want to witness a return to hereditary rule, as many Iranians view it as undermining the 1979 revolution, which ousted the U.S.-backed authoritarian monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

Alireza Arafi

After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death, Iran named senior cleric Alireza Arafi to its interim leadership council, which also includes President Pezeshkian and Chief Justice Mohseni-Eje’i.

Arafi has been a member of the Guardian Council—the country’s powerful Islamic legal authority, comprised of clerics and lawyers—since 2019. The council is mandated to oversee elections, to vet candidates for elections, and to veto legislation passed by the parliament to ensure conformity with Islamic standards. Arafi also heads the Iranian seminary.

According to Alex Vatanka of the D.C.-based think tank Middle East Institute, Arafi’s rise to power could be traced to how the latter has appointed him to senior posts. Vatanka described Arafi as one of Khamenei’s “loyalists that will advance his agenda and in return they enjoy his patronage.”

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri, an Assembly of Experts member since 2015, is known as a staunch conservative in the clerical establishment. 

The current leader of the Islamic Sciences Academy in the northern city of Qom, Mirbagheri gained public attention in 2024, after the sudden death of President Ebrahim Raisi, when he expressed support for the hardline candidate Saeed Jalili through his speeches. According to activist outlet Iran Wire, “super-revolutionary” factions in the establishment view Mirbagheri as a potential future leader.

Mirbagheri has made headlines for his extreme rhetoric, including thwarting “infidels” and branding the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests after Mahsa Amini’s killing as “Western-inspired sedition.” Mirbagheri has also previously quoted the late Supreme Leader Khomeini, saying that establishing a “new culture based on Islam in the world” would entail “hardship, martyrdom, and hunger” and that the Iranian people had “voluntarily chosen” to take that path.

Ali Larijani

Ali Larijani, a veteran politician, took the reins of Iran’s crisis management and national security at the start of this year, Iranian officials told the Times. He was appointed by Pezeshkian and Khamenei to head Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in August last year—a post he held from 2005 to 2007—and in that role led nuclear negotiations with the Trump Administration before the U.S. and Israel launched attacks over the weekend. He was also in charge of the deadly crackdown on anti-government protests earlier this year, for which he was sanctioned by the U.S. government.

The 67-year-old has a storied career behind him that has positioned him well to act as a power broker after Khamenei’s assassination. He was a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the head of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting from 1994 to 2004, and has held several other governmental roles over four decades. He unsuccessfully ran for President in 2005, and filed for candidacy in the 2021 and 2024 presidential elections but was disqualified in both.

He is known for being a loyalist to Khamenei and a pragmatist in managing relations between rival factions within the country. He also brought a pragmatic approach to nuclear talks with the U.S., reportedly telling Oman state television last month that “if the Americans’ concern is that Iran should not move toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, that can be addressed.”

After the U.S.-Israeli attacks, however, Larijani has urged powerful retaliation. “We will make the Zionist criminals and the shameless Americans regret their actions,” he posted on Saturday, noting in another post that Iran did not initiate the hostilities. “The brave soldiers and the great nation of Iran will deliver an unforgettable lesson to the hellish international oppressors.” 

Despite Larijani’s influence, he is not a senior Shiite cleric, which makes him an unlikely successor under Iran’s current constitution.