Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has reportedly been removed from the most relevant strategic decisions by the surviving senior military commanders, due to a severe deterioration in his mental health.
The information, published by the opposition outlet Iran International, suggests that the elderly ayatollah, who is 86 years old, may have suffered a nervous breakdown after the military escalation with Israel, and since then he has been kept away from the most sensitive national security debates.
According to the same source, the leader's mental decline began to become evident after the assassination of several of his most trusted men in Israeli airstrikes targeting Revolutionary Guard objectives.
El líder supremo de Irán, Alí Jamenei
According to Iran International, key figures in the military and intelligence apparatus, including members of the Supreme National Security Council, then decided to gradually exclude Khamenei from executive decisions.
Additionally, the Iranian supreme leader was also reportedly moved to an underground bunker located in the Lavizan area, northeast of Tehran, just hours after Israel began its airstrikes on the capital on Friday morning. Two sources "with access to information" from inside the country confirmed this to Iran International.
According to those informants, Khamenei's entire family, including his son Mojtaba, is with him in the underground shelter. The sources also indicated that this measure had already been adopted previously, during the Iranian operations known as "True Promise 1" and "True Promise 2," carried out against Israel.
El líder supremo de Irán, Alí Jamenei
On those occasions, Mojtaba was accompanying his father in the bunker, although two of his sons, Masoud and Mostafa, were not present at that time.
It should be recalled that Iran's first direct attack on Israeli territory, the "True Promise 1" operation, took place on April 13, 2024. In that offensive, more than 300 drones and missiles were launched against the Israeli civilian population, in retaliation for the assassination of senior commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in an airstrike in Damascus.
