Iran names Ayatollah Alireza Arafi to interim council after Khamenei death

the Islamic RepublicIran’s ambiguous and fractured regime after the killing of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei The Taliban chose hardline cleric Ayatollah Ali Reza Arfi to join its interim leadership council on Saturday.

Ben Sabti, an expert on Iranian affairs at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, said, “His name has been raised in the past two or three years. He is not the political type, but part of exporting the revolution from the propaganda side.” One of the cornerstones of the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 was to export its violent Shiite ideology and promote radical Islamic revolutions around the world.

“He has been immersed in Khomeinist ideology his entire career,” Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, told Fox News Digital. “Khomeinism is a threat to U.S. interests.”

The 1979 pledge of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to “death to America” ​​is a key feature of Khomeiniism, according to experts.

Women walk past election posters of Ayatollah Ali Reza Arfi, a candidate for the upcoming Assembly of Experts elections, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, February 21, 2024. (Wahid Salemi/AP Photo)

According to a UANI report, Arfi has long been inciting against the United States and Israel. He was quoted as saying: “America will take its desire for Iran to abandon the production of military equipment to the grave,” and in a 2019 Friday prayer sermon he declared: “We will remain with our imam and leader until the end, when we will be humiliated.” [global] arrogance. We say with the Master of Resistance: O great leader of the Islamic world, we will be with you until the end, when the arrogant people in the world are defeated and Israel is wiped out.

Brodsky continued: “The fact that the Iranian regime has elevated Ali Reza Arfi to membership of the Interim Leadership Council is an indication that he could be a leading candidate to replace Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader.

Arfi is also under surveillance in Washington. In an interview with Fox News Digital on Sunday. Rep. Brian Mast, Republican of FloridaThe head of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee described Arfi as a “very strict cleric.”

Shocking allegations emerge from detained protesters in Iran as regime claims protest ‘sedition is over’ (Mortaza Nikoubazel/Noor Photo via Getty Images/NCRI)

He noted, “Arafi was promoted through the ranks, heading the Iranian seminary, heading Al-Mustafa University, and serving as a member of the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts. In addition, he was the imam of Friday prayers in the city of Qom, the center of Iranian clergy. This provides him with the religious, educational, and governmental experience to replace Khamenei as Supreme Leader.”

The report says Iran’s supreme leader runs a “state within a state” through a secret network of 4,000 people

According to UANI, Arfi promised “death” to protesters who knock on the turbans of Iranian Islamic clerics. “Those who attack the turbans of clerics should know that the turban will become their shroud,” Orfi said.

Brodsky added, “Arfi helped transform Al-Mustafa University into a training ground and recruitment center for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.” [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]. Subsequently, the US government imposed sanctions on Al-Mustafa University under counter-terrorism authorities. One of the weaknesses in his candidacy to replace Khamenei is that he was never a core member of the military-security establishment in Iran, and he never led a branch of the Islamic Republic’s government apparatus.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, head of the judiciary Gholam Hossein Mohseni Eji, and Ali Reza Arfi (right), deputy head of the Assembly of Experts, attend a meeting of Iran’s Interim Leadership Council at an undisclosed location, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Iran, March 1, 2026. (Release via Reuters)

“He is not a master either. [sign of high respect for people of lineage from the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Shiite tradition.] But serving on an interim leadership council would put him in danger Foreign policy and security issues Largely, his status as a formidable competitor. He added that Ali Reza Arfi is a follower of the Khomeini doctrine and led efforts aimed at promoting the Islamization of universities and religious institutes in Iran.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei died after an Israeli army raid on a compound in Tehran, an Israeli source confirms

According to Iran Wire, an independent Iranian news outlet in the diaspora, “Ali Reza Arfi is a prominent hardline cleric, a member of Iran’s Guardian Council and the head of Iran’s religious institutes, positions that place him at the center of the country’s religious establishment. His selection is important because the third member of the Interim Leadership Council must be a theologian chosen by the regime’s Expediency Discernment Council — and Arfi is widely seen as a staunch devotee of the party’s core ideology.” Islamic Republic.

On March 1, 2026, in Sanaa, Yemen. Pro-Iranian protesters wave billboards depicting Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Yemeni and Iranian flags, weapons, and chant slogans at a rally to condemn the US-Israeli air attacks on Iran and the killing of Khamenei and several military officials. (Mohamed Hammoud/Getty Images)

Mardo Sogum, a veteran journalist and Iran expert, told Fox News Digital: “What I can say at this point is that there is no unified government that has sufficient control over the country. The Secretary of State acknowledges that the IRGC is on its own. Arfi will never have the power or control that Khamenei has. He is a compromise candidate that the IRGC can control and does not pose a threat to two factions.”

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“The regime or what is left of it is no different from a terrorist group,” Maryam Meamar Sadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and founder and director of the Cyrus Forum for the Future of Iran, told Fox News Digital. The United States and Israel are bombing United States and Israel, every leader the terrorist group truly chooses will be eliminated. The Iranian people are happy. All decent human beings who believe in freedom should rejoice.”

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