Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is “wounded and probably crippled,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a briefing on Friday. TASR informs about it according to the report of the AP agency.
Appointment of Khamenei
Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed as Iran’s new supreme spiritual leader on March 8. The Assembly of Experts elected him more than a week after his father and predecessor, Ali Khamenei, died on the first day of US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28.
Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement on Thursday, but he did not personally appear in public and did not even read it himself, Sky News reminds. Hegseth called the statement “weak”.
Statement without video
“There was no voice or video. It was a written statement,” he said. “Iran has a lot of cameras and a lot of voice recorders. So why a written statement? I think you know why… His father is dead. He’s scared; he’s injured; he’s on the run and he lacks legitimacy. It’s chaos for them. Who’s in charge? Iran may not even know. We know by the hour and they know that the military capabilities of their evil regime are crumbling,” the US defense secretary said.
According to Hegseth, the US is “decimating the army of the radical Iranian regime in a way the world has never seen before.”
Attacks on Iranian targets
According to him, the American and Israeli air forces hit more than 15,000 enemy targets in 14 days of the war. “That’s more than 1,000 a day, no other combination of countries in the world can do that,” he added.
There has been speculation about Khamenei’s health before, as he has not appeared in public since his appointment on March 8, according to a British news station. An Israeli intelligence report said Mojtaba Khamenei suffered minor injuries on the day his father was killed in an airstrike in the early hours of the war.
Earlier this week, Iranian state television described Khamenei as a “wounded veteran of the Ramadan war”, but did not specify his alleged injuries, writes AFP. Citing three unnamed Iranian officials, The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Khamenei “suffered injuries, including leg injuries, but was conscious and hiding in a highly secure location with limited communication.”
