Since February 28, 2026, the war has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, national security chief Ali Larijani, intelligence minister Esmail Khatib and the head of the IRGC navy, among others. Ali Khamenei spent 37 years making himself the tentpole of the system: the one figure every faction feared and every faction needed. That tentpole is gone.

What replaced it is not a new chain of command. It is a set of rival blocs, each with its own power base, circling a new Supreme Leader who has the title but not yet the authority. To understand who runs Iran now, you have to understand who is fighting whom.

The center that cannot hold: Mojtaba Khamenei

Supreme Leader since March 9, 2026. For decades Mojtaba ran his father’s office, the Beyt, where he built close ties to the intelligence services and the Revolutionary Guards. He never held public office, held only a mid-ranking clerical title until his appointment, and has no political base of his own.

His early messages show a leader reaching for authority he has not earned. He described Iranians as a “commissioned nation” living through a new Be’sat, language normally reserved for the Prophet’s mission, and warned that even “justified” disputes must not turn into division. His own camp has had to defend him: when the hardline cleric Hamid Rasaee quoted the Quranic verse about Noah’s unworthy son under the headline “Who is worthy of leadership?”, loyalists accused him of attacking a leader running the state despite his own physical injuries.

Where he stands: rather than balance the factions as his father did, Mojtaba is building a personal base out of old-guard security men. Every appointment below is part of that project.

The security core: the men with the guns

This is the bloc that is rising fastest, and the one Mojtaba is betting on.

Ahmad Vahidi, Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC. A founding figure in IRGC intelligence and commander of the Quds Force from 1988 through the 1990s, when it built its networks abroad. Later defense minister and interior minister, he oversaw the state’s response to the 2022 uprising. He is wanted by Interpol and now faces trial in absentia in Argentina over the 1994 AMIA bombing, which killed 85 people. Ali Khamenei made him deputy IRGC commander on December 31, 2025, days into the uprising. He has run the Guards since the first day of the war, and Mojtaba made it official on August 10, ordering him to prepare for “powerful offensive operations.” Read his full profile.

Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. IRGC commander-in-chief from 1981 to 1997, a perennial presidential candidate, and Vahidi’s co-defendant in the AMIA case. His August 9 appointment removed Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, an ally of Speaker Ghalibaf, from the body where war, diplomacy and internal security are coordinated.

Hossein Taeb, head of the Basij. IRGC intelligence chief from 2009 to 2022, the years of the Green Movement crackdown and the bloodiest protest waves since. Now in command of the paramilitary force that does the regime’s street-level repression.

Ali Abdollahi, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Former head of the Khatam al-Anbiya central command, ordered by Mojtaba to merge it with the General Staff. He has threatened that any neighbor shielding the United States will be “engulfed by the flames of war.”

Reports have also pointed to an alliance between Vahidi and former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, which would make Jafari one of the most powerful men in the state without holding any formal post.

What this bloc wants: survival through force. Two of its leaders are charged with mass murder abroad. They have no future outside the system and every reason to defend it to the end.

The technocratic cartel: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf

Speaker of Parliament and chief negotiator. A former IRGC air force commander and national police chief who took part in the crackdown on the 1999 student protests, then mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017, a tenure that produced a long trail of corruption scandals. He has run for president three times.

Ghalibaf’s camp holds the executive levers and the diplomatic tracks. Its priority is technocratic crisis management: stabilize the collapsing economy, keep the state machinery running, end the factional attacks on the government and the Security Council, and claw back the power the war handed to provincial IRGC commands.

Where he stands: Mojtaba singled him out for praise in his first major message. Since then, the loss of Zolghadr at the Security Council has clipped his camp’s reach. He is useful to the Supreme Leader, but no longer indispensable.

The ideological front: Saeed Jalili and the Paydari hardliners

The hardline counterweight. Jalili was chief nuclear negotiator from 2007 to 2013, when his rigid approach helped bring successive UN Security Council resolutions down on Iran. He lost the 2024 presidential election and sits on the Security Council as a representative of the Supreme Leader.

His camp rejects Ghalibaf’s pragmatism. It argues unity is only possible around “revolutionary principles,” opposes any concession in talks, and frames every crisis as “infiltration” and “deviation.” Its power lies in state television and the nightly loyalist rallies the regime relies on to hold the streets. An effort by Ghalibaf’s allies to remove Jalili from the Security Council failed. The Paydari cleric Hamid Rasaee’s “son of Noah” post came from this camp.

Where he stands: any diplomatic opening has to survive this faction first, and it has shown it is willing to challenge even the dynastic principle behind Mojtaba’s rule. Read more on the factional struggle.

The enforcer: Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei

Head of the Judiciary since 2021. A graduate of the Haqqani seminary in Qom, the training ground for much of the regime’s security clergy, Ejei has spent his career at the junction of the courts and the intelligence ministry. In the 1980s he served in the Revolutionary Courts and as the judiciary’s representative to the Ministry of Intelligence, the role that fed the 1988 death commissions with the names of prisoners. He later prosecuted dissident clerics in the Special Court for the Clergy, was linked by critics to the “chain murders” of writers and intellectuals in the 1990s, served as intelligence minister from 2005 to 2009, and as prosecutor general during the crackdown on the 2009 protests. The United States and the European Union have sanctioned him for human rights abuses.

Where he stands: Ejei belongs to no faction so much as to the system itself. In April he demanded faster sentences against “enemies”; in October he warned officials not to anger the people on the same morning his judiciary hanged two protesters. Whoever wins the struggle above him, he is the one who carries out the sentences.

The diplomatic façade: Abbas Araghchi

Foreign Minister since 2024. Araghchi served in the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq war before joining the foreign ministry in 1988, and has said he still keeps his uniform. He served as ambassador to Finland and Japan, worked on the nuclear file under Jalili, then switched sides to become a lead negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal under Mohammad-Javad Zarif. Critics noted that the deal’s easing of sanctions on Persian carpets benefited his family’s carpet trade. Sidelined in 2021, he returned as foreign minister by assuring parliament that its resolutions would bind the diplomats and that he was not one of the Zarif-era negotiators hardliners despised.

Where he stands: polished in Western capitals, but he does not decide. One lawmaker has described how Araghchi asked parliament to stage opposition so negotiators could claim their hands were tied. The façade is part of the strategy.

What the map shows

The Islamic Republic is not becoming a conventional military junta. The Guards manage day-to-day survival, but they still need the Supreme Leader’s religious authority to keep its predatory factions from tearing each other apart. The question is whether Mojtaba can supply it.

So far, the answer is mixed. He is building a security core of loyal, internationally isolated men. The technocrats and the ideologues are fighting over his words. The judiciary keeps executing. And the elected institutions matter mainly as arenas for these fights, not as places where decisions are made.

A system this divided at the top, ruling a society this close to the edge, is not preparing to reform. It is preparing to hold on, and it may not be able to.