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The result is that the allegation now hanging over Mojtaba Khamenei is inseparable from the larger crisis of legitimacy engulfing Iran’s leadership after the killing of his father. What might otherwise have been treated as rumour or intelligence gossip has been thrust into a setting in which rival states are openly discussing succession, injury, control of the regime and the future direction of the war. Whether the underlying claim can ever be publicly substantiated is unclear. What is already clear is that it has become part of a broader U.S. intelligence picture portraying Iran’s new supreme leader as a weak, wounded and politically constrained figure whose personal life, health and authority are all under question at the very moment he is supposed to embody the continuity of the Islamic Republic.
