Reeling from a crisis, the Iranian people haven’t heard a thing from their supreme leader in days.
It’s been more than two days since Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, yet Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not emerged from hiding or even commented on the development, raising serious questions about his whereabouts and his condition.
According to The New York Times, an Iranian state TV host asked an official from the ayatollah’s office on Tuesday about the 86-year-old’s wellbeing, noting that “people are very worried about the supreme leader.”
The official didn’t answer directly, but said, “The people who are responsible for protecting the supreme leader are doing their job well.”
The ayatollah, who has led Iran since 1989, has not been seen or heard from publicly in nearly a week, according to The Times.
There were, however, a couple of posts on social media accounts managed by his office two days ago, hours before Trump’s ceasefire announcement.
“Those who know the Iranian people and their history know that the Iranian nation isn’t a nation that surrenders,” read a message on Khamenei’s English-language account, about an hour before Trump’s post. Another showed a burning American flag.
His silence follows a turbulent two weeks in which Israel launched an extensive military campaign targeting scores of Iranian military and nuclear targets. Iran sustained significant casualties, with high-ranking military officials and nuclear scientists among those killed.
Khamenei subsequently took refuge in a bunker and cut off electronic communications to avoid potential assassination attempts, Iranian officials told The Times in a report published earlier this week. He also reportedly named potential candidates to succeed him should be killed.
Reporting from the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday, CNN’s Erin Burnett said a source had told her that Iran’s foreign minister “was unable to get in touch with the supreme leader of the country during the ceasefire itself on whether to make a deal.”
“I mean, this is incredible,” she said. “This is the man who has been calling the shots for 36 years, and here we are at one of the most important moments, maybe the most important in those years, and he’s nowhere to be seen.”
“And there’s been no one more vocal over those past decades when it comes to threatening the United States,” she added.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has all but endorsed regime change in Iran. The Trump administration initially said it was opposed to any such action after its weekend strikes, but the president jumbled that messaging on Sunday when he suggested he was open to it. He’s since shut that notion down again after the warring Middle Eastern countries reached a shaky truce that he has taken credit for.
The post Where on Earth Is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
