He is far more dangerous than his father as he is willing to lie and places no value on human life, said a former classmate of the new supreme leader.
Jaber Rajabi, who worked as a foreign policy adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and as a mediator for pro-regime militias in Iraq, via a written statement from his home in the United Arab Emirates, where he has been living in exile under local protection since 2021.
Rajabi’s family was loyal to the regime: his father fought in the Iraq war, while his mother worked briefly in the office of the now-murdered supreme leader. It was this family background that led the regime to recruit him after they found him fighting in Moqtada al-Sadr’s terrorist groups against US forces in Iraq.
Rajabi first met Mojtaba in the city of Qom, where he began studying with him at a religious school. “At that time he was very hypocritical. He was saying something, but inside there was something completely different,” he said. Earlier, speaking to “The Atlantic”, he had said that his former fellow student was obsessed with the end of the world and believed that “he himself will play a special role in accelerating the course of humanity in this direction”.
“I said this many years ago: if war breaks out, Mojtaba will try to control the region,” Rajabi argued. “Americans should not expect that if Mojtaba backs down and appears to want peace, that reflects his true intentions.”
“Indifference to human life”
Rajabi stated that Mojtaba Khamenei does not value human life. “If he can kill 13,000 of his own people, then he will have no problem killing 100,000 in Tel Aviv, because if you don’t care about the lives of your own people, why should you care about the lives of others in Tel Aviv?” he said.
Trying to predict the coming months, maybe even years, under the new leadership, Rajabi noted: “Mojtaba will not declare from the first day in power that he wants to take Jerusalem. He is the opposite of his father Ali Khamenei who gets angry easily and it shows… Mojtaba can lie much better and knows how to play the game.”
According to him, his goal will be to gain time. “He wants to fool the Americans and the region in order to gain trust… He thinks he has to control the Middle East first, and for him it’s more of a religious issue than a geopolitical one.”
When did the relationship with Mojtaba Khamenei break down?
Rajabi stepped down from his position in the Iranian regime in 2017. His earlier personal relationship with Mojtaba protected him for a time, even as he publicly criticized the regime. However, that attitude changed when he started talking about Mojtaba Khamenei’s financial networks, which – according to a report by The Media Line – reportedly include assets worth at least $3 billion in London, the United Arab Emirates, European countries and Iran.
Rajabi also claims to have survived an attempted arsenic poisoning, which damaged his teeth, as well as a later attempted electrocution, which he attributes to circles connected to Khamenei’s entourage.
