One of the few times it’s worth seeing what Al Jazeera has to say and expecting a credible answer is when the question is: Who’s running Iran now?
The Iran-friendly news outlet spews out anti-West propaganda often as not, but it also has a critical mass of followers who actually care about the survival of the Khamenei regime in Iran. So, it’s worth paying attention this time.
What Al Jazeera is reporting is that a “three-member leadership council” is leading Iran now. This is in the wake of the Israeli-U.S. air strikes that killed Ali Khamenei. It appears that Khamenei, at 86 years old, still had no clear succession plan. Khamenei had been in power since 1989.
One interesting dynamic about a three-member leadership council is that it’s obviously guarding against next-man-up vulnerability as the U.S. and Israel look for more strategic targets. You can assume none of these three will be found in the same room as each other any time soon.
Pointing to Article 111 of Iran’s constitution, Al Jazeera reported that a temporary leadership council will assume the supreme leader’s responsibilities until the religious leaders in Iran name a successor. The council includes Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian; Iran’s chief justice of its Supreme Court, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei; and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, who is a member of something called the “Guardian Council.” The Guardian Council is an unelected, 12-member group of appointees, mostly, who deal with judicial, policy, and governance issues, like assuring “election integrity.”
According to Al Jazeera, Ayatollah Arafi, the youngster on the leadership council at 66 years of age, has been a key member of the Guardian Council since 2019. His major priority at this time has been to ensure that the country’s laws and policies “conform to Islamic principles.” The council approves candidates for election, and it has veto powers over the legislative process. He’s also known as the leader of Friday prayers in “Iran’s most important religious centre.” If he lived in the U.S., he’d make a great Democrat.
Pezeshkian, 71, Al Jazeera says, “is a reformist politician and heart surgeon who served in the army during the Iran-Iraq War. He was elected president in the 2024 elections.” Over the years, he’s been the health minister and a member of parliament, where he represented the city of Tabriz.
Politically, Pezeshkian lost when he ran for the presidency on a platform that promised economic stabilization and the easing of Iran’s oppressive social restrictions. He also pushed to pursue more constructive dialogue internationally. He won in 2024 when he advocated for more reform-oriented solutions. If that sounds reasonable to you, keep in mind that his statement to the world after Khamenei was killed declared that Iran now has a “legitimate duty and right to avenge the perpetrators and masterminds of this historic crime.”
The third member of the interim leadership council is 69-year-old Mohseni-Ejei, a religious leader who has called the judiciary his leadership home. Khamenei appointed him to the post in 2021.
He had been Iran’s intelligence minister for four years, starting in 2005. After that, he was “prosecutor-general and first deputy chief justice.” Imagine how brutal he must be if Al Jazeera is saying that he’s thought of as “as a hardline figure aligned with the conservative wing of the government.”
Back in January, when unarmed students and civilians took to the streets of Iran in protest, Mohseni-Ejei called them “rioters” and said there would be “no leniency” for them.
Since this story originated at Al Jazeera, you can take some of it with a grain of salt, but the real question is, “If the Iranian regime is likely amplifying this through its favorite propaganda outlet, what does it want you to know, and why?”
I’d add: What does the regime not want us to know? I’d wager that it doesn’t want us to know how suddenly and severely weakened Iran has become due to the death of an elderly religious tyrant with no succession plan.
From a leadership standpoint, here’s something to ponder. If your best leader was just killed in the way Khamenei was, how suddenly unattractive is the job of being Iran’s “supreme leader”? Anyone who would take that job would be committing suicide by air strike. The same holds true for these three men, who may not live to get much older.
Not one of them is likely to escape the reach of the U.S. and Israel if our two countries want them gone. If they survive all of this, it will be because someone allowed them to survive. The law of averages says that if the U.S. or Israel were to take these three out, the competency and effectiveness of their back-ups come into question.
What’s next is anyone’s guess, but I think what Trump may have in mind is closer to what he did with Venezuela than what President George W. Bush did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump has shown no appetite for generation-long wars or any interest in attempting to install an American-style democracy from scratch in Iran.
Study Trump long enough, and you’ll know he’d prefer a quick resolution after some tough negotiations. Still, at this point, I wouldn’t expect any members of the leadership council to be in a position to handle those negotiations when the time comes.
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