As senior clerics responsible for selecting Iran's next supreme leader met earlier this week to discuss their pick, a familiar name emerged as the frontrunner: Mojtaba Khamenei.
The son of Iran's former leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wields massive influence inside Iran and was once described in US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks as "the power behind the robes".
His mother, wife, and one of his sisters died in the strikes that killed his father last weekend, but the younger Khamenei was reportedly not present and is believed to still be alive.
And yet, despite the power he has wielded behind closed doors, analysts say he is a surprising choice for the top role.
For a long time, he was slated to become his father's successor.
"But for the past two years, [he] seemed to have dropped off from the radar," Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and Shiite Islam at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times.
"If he is elected, it suggests it is a much more hard-line Revolutionary Guard side of the regime that is now in charge."
Khamenei's son has not held government office, is rarely seen in public, and many Iranians have never even heard him speak.
But he is backed by one of the country's most powerful organisations, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as the Basij volunteer paramilitary force.
And his potential appointment arrives at a pivotal and turbulent moment in Iran's 48-year history.
The regime has only navigated the succession process once before, but unlike the managed transition that followed the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, this process will take place following currency erosion, a water crisis, massive protests, a widespread crackdown — and a full-scale war.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has also warned that whoever comes next will be "an unequivocal target for elimination".
It will ultimately be up to the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member clerical body, to decide who the next leader is.
Political analysts inside Iran have told the ABC the assembly will "want to do [this] as soon as the security situation permits".
And if Mojtaba assumes the role, it would be a clear sign the regime has no intention of changing course as it faces attacks from not only Israel, but the United States.
The son rises in his father's place
Until 1979, Iran was ruled by the shah — a dictator, to some, who maintained a tight grip on power, while also pushing the country to become a Western-style secular nation.
Prolonged protests and a revolution followed, which saw the monarchy collapse, the Shah flee the country, and Islamic religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini take control.
Ali Khamenei was one of the men who pushed for the new regime, turning the chaos that followed into a ladder that he scaled to the very top.
In doing so, he changed the fate of Iran and his children.
Born in 1969, Mojtaba, Khamenei's second son, studied theology after graduating from high school.
At 17, he went to fight in the Iran-Iraq war with the Habib ibn Mazahir Battalion, a division of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
It would turn out to be the beginning of a lifelong entanglement. According to the US Treasury, the younger Khamenei has continued to work closely with the group, both with commanders of its expeditionary Quds Force and its all-volunteer Basij.
When the senior Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989, the position brought untold riches under the family's purview.
He oversaw one of the largest state-owned conglomerates in the Middle East, called the Execution of Imam Khomeini's Order, also known as Setad, which operates in sectors ranging from insurance to energy and telecoms.
Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly played a central role in the administration of his father's financial assets. Along the way, he amassed a more modest overseas empire.
Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in January that his fortune includes everything from Persian Gulf shipping to Swiss bank accounts and British luxury property worth in excess of £100 million ($AUD190 million).
"Mojtaba has major stakes or de facto control in various entities throughout Iran and abroad," Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has studied the Khamenei family's financial empire, told Bloomberg.
The younger Khamenei refrains from putting assets in his own name, but he has been actively involved in deals dating to at least 2011, the outlet reported.
Mojtaba served as a 'mini-supreme leader'
Since the late 1990s, Mojtaba has also built more and more influence across the regime's political, security and clerical institutions.
He holds extremist and anti-Western views and is said to be more violent and ideological than his father.
When Iranians went to the polls in 2009, the result was allegedly rigged in a campaign "spearheaded and orchestrated by Mojtaba and the Bayt", a secretive and complex institution rooted in religious doctrine, Iranian specialists Kasra Aarabi and Saeid Golkar wrote in their 2026 report, Unmasking the Bayt.
"As protests erupted in response, Khamenei's second son would transform himself into the unofficial supreme security commander to control the repression of demonstrators," the authors wrote.
The Bayt, they went on to say, is the single-most important entity in the Islamic Republic's policymaking, and the true powerbrokers of the system are Khamenei's four sons: Mostafa, Mojtaba, Masoud and Meysam.
While his oldest brother kept a low public profile, Mojtaba effectively served as a "mini-supreme leader" within his father's office, they added.
"Mojtaba Khamenei … has long operated behind the scenes in Tehran, building deep ties with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and consolidating influence within the regime's power structure," Dr Eric Mandel, director of the Middle East Political and Information Network (MEPIN), told London-based outlet Iran International.
"He is widely viewed as one of the architects of the regime's repression."
His expanding power ruffled feathers over the years. US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in the early 2000s recounted criticism from those close to conservative circles that claimed Khamenei tapped his own father's phone and served as his "principal gatekeeper".
"The doctor indicated that while Mojtaba essentially derives his power from his father's position, he is building his own power base," it said.
In 2022, he was given the title of ayatollah, which is essential to high-level promotion within the regime.
But while his father's name elevated him in Iran, being the son of a supreme leader is also something of a drawback in the Islamic Republic.
The regime opposed hereditary rule
In the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the US-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was toppled in favour of a system that advocated that religious scholarship should determine their choice of leader.
Supporters of the system were critical of a hereditary succession.
The senior Khamenei reportedly shared this sentiment, with an Iranian source close to his office telling Reuters in 2024 that the ayatollah did not want to witness a return to hereditary rule.
"Sons don't succeed their fathers," historian Meir Litvak told the Atlantic before the war.
"Appointing Mojtaba would violate this taboo."
But Israel and the United States' recent action inside Iran and the instability of war may shift those views.
Supporters of the government would likely see Mojtaba, who has decades of experience working inside the supreme leader's office, as a continuation of his father's rule, analysts say.
His close ties to the IRGC and intelligence networks and his ideological alignment would also be viewed favourably by regime backers.
Critics, however, would view the appointment of the younger Khamenei as the continuation of an oppressive regime that has overseen economic chaos and the violent suppression of protests.
Mr Litvak told the Atlantic that the Islamic Republic could sidestep the awkwardness of a father-son succession by appointing another ayatollah to occupy the supreme leadership for a couple of years, and then let Mojtaba take over.
If that takes place, there is a shortlist of other names that have been floated in the succession race.
They include Khamenei's chief of staff Ali Asghar Hejazi, Supreme Court chief justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i and Hassan Khomeini, a moderate cleric and grandson of the Islamic Republic's late founder.
'They are all dead'
All of them will be opposed by US President Donald Trump, who said the attack he launched on February 28 "was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates" the superpower had considered.
"It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead," he said last week.
When asked who will lead Iran next, Trump told NBC that he believed at some point "they'll be calling me to ask who I'd like," adding that he was "only being a little sarcastic when I say that".
"We want them to have a good leader. We have some people who I think would do a good job," he added, but declined to name anyone.
Other figures in support of the regime have cautioned that Iran's leadership has not been finalised.
"The news that we have is that they haven't voted yet. So I think we shouldn't take that very seriously," said Foad Izadi, a regime supporter and professor at Tehran University.
No matter who it ends up being, it is likely to happen soon.
"I don't think it would be weeks [for a successor to be decided]," Mr Izadi told the ABC.
"I think it could be days. They want to do it as soon as the security situation permits that."
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