US President Donald Trump on Sunday cautioned that Iran’s next supreme leader would struggle to remain in power without his backing, as Tehran prepared to announce the successor to the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s Assembly of Experts held a private meeting and selected the country’s next leader, according to members of the body, nine days after US and Israeli strikes on Khamenei’s compound killed him and pushed the Middle East into conflict,
The clerics did not reveal the chosen individual, saying only that the name would be announced soon. Some insiders indicated that Khamenei’s 56-year-old son, Mojtaba Khamenei, could be the one to succeed his father.
What did Trump say?
Trump had previously demanded a say in the appointment and rejected the younger Khamenei as an unacceptable “lightweight”.
“He’s going to have to get approval from us,” Trump told ABC News on Sunday, referring to Iran’s next leader. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long.”
But Tehran’s top diplomat said earlier in the day that the decision was Iran’s alone, adding it would “allow nobody to interfere in our domestic affairs”.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went on to demand that Trump “apologize to people of the region” for the spiraling war.
The younger Khamenei is regarded as a conservative figure, notably because of his ties to the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological arm of the Islamic republic’s military.
Israel’s military has warned any successor that “we will not hesitate to target you”. Israel’s reach was underlined by two new operations overnight — strikes against fuel dumps in and around Tehran, and an attack on a hotel in the heart of Lebanon’s capital Beirut that targeted suspected Iranian commanders.
Warplanes hit five oil facilities around the Iranian capital, killing at least four people, according to a state oil executive, and blanketing the city in acrid smoke.
Tehran’s governor told the IRNA news agency that fuel distribution had been “temporarily interrupted” in the capital.
A dark haze hung over the city of 10 million people, blocking out the sun, while the smell of burning fuel lingered in the air. Authorities warned the fumes could be toxic and urged citizens to stay indoors, but many windows were blown out by the force of the blasts.
“The blaze has been burning for more than 12 hours, the air has become unbreathable. I can’t even go out to do the daily shopping,” said a 35-year-old from Tehran.
“At first, I supported this war. After Khamenei’s death, I celebrated with my friends: we drank wine and we danced. But since yesterday… people say there’s not even any gasoline left at the gas stations,” she said in a text message to Europe.
As the conflict entered its ninth day, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stated that it had sufficient resources to sustain its drone and missile operations across the Middle East for as long as six months.
Multiple explosions were reported over Israel’s commercial center, Tel Aviv, after the Israeli military detected a barrage of missiles launched from Iran. The emergency service Magen David Adom reported that six people were injured in central Israel.
Meanwhile, Trump again declined to dismiss the possibility of deploying American ground forces to Iran, while maintaining that the conflict was nearly won despite Iran’s continuing missile and drone attacks.
