Amid fear of assassination as Israel and now the United States pummels Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is now being guarded by a unit not known to exist until now, according to a new report.
According to The Telegraph, a previously unknown group of bodyguards who have been thoroughly vetted is guarding Khamenei.
Senior officials within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did not even know about the unit, the report said.
“But his life is in danger, and there is a unit responsible for his protection that no one even knew existed to avoid any chance of infiltration,” an Iranian official The Telegraph did not name said.
The official said unlike former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Khamenei has no plan to leave.
“He is in Iran and is not going anywhere. He won’t flee like the coward Assad,” the official said.
It is unclear where Khamenei lives these days. The Telegraph report said it was possible he lived beneath or near the IRGC media operations center in central Tehran.
A report in The New York Times said Khamenei communicates to Iranian commanders through an aide and avoids electronic communication so that he cannot be tracked. The Times cited Iranian officials it did not name as its sources.
From hiding, he has picked replacements for military leaders in the event they are killed by Israeli attacks, as many of Iran’s top military leaders have been since Israel attacked the country on June 13.
He has also picked three top Islamic clerics as the candidates to replace him.
“It is clear that we had a massive security and intelligence breach; there is no denying this,” Mahdi Mohammadi, a top adviser to Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Ghalibaf, said in an audio recording analyzing the war. “Our senior commanders were all assassinated within one hour.”
In the aftermath of Khamenei’s unprecedented action to name potential successors, the New York Post carried what it said was a comment from a source close to the White House.
“If you need any more evidence that the ayatollah is shaking in his boots, look no further than him identifying his three stooges,” the source, who was not named, said.
“Like the new head of the Iranian military whom the Israelis killed last week only days after he was promoted, these guys are not long for this world,” a source the Post said was a “former Trump administration national security official” told the outlet. “Their new godly command should be to book a one-way ticket out of the country ASAP.”
On Saturday, Israel continued to decimate Iran’s leadership, according to The Times of Israel.
An Israeli airstrike killed Saeed Izadi, the head of the Palestine Corps in the IRGC Quds Force, the Israel Defense Forces said.
Izadi was “one of the architects” of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre “and among the few who knew of it prior to its execution,” the IDF asserted.
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