Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since he replaced his slain father as Iran’s supreme leader.
Published On 20 Mar 2026
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has said Iran’s enemies were being “defeated” in a written message for the Persian New Year, as the US and Israel continue to pound the country with attacks.
In a statement read on Iranian television on Friday, Khamenei praised the steadfastness of the Iranian people marking Nowruz, which he said ushered in the year of a “resistance economy under national unity and national security”.
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“At the moment, due to the particular unity that has been created between you, our compatriots – despite all the differences in religious, intellectual, cultural and political origins – the enemy has been defeated,” he said.
Khamenei has not been seen in public since he became supreme leader, following the assassination of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of the war on February 28.
Iran’s supreme leader said that while the US and Israel believed that after one or two days of attacks, the Iranian people would overthrow the government, but this was a “gross miscalculation”.
The war was launched under “the delusion that if the pinnacle of the regime and certain influential military figures were to attain martyrdom, it would instil fear and despair in our dear people … and through this means, the dream of dominating Iran and subsequently dismembering it would be realised”, he said.
Instead, “a fracture has emerged in the enemy,” he added.
Analysts have observed that the Iranian constitution itself was drafted with the spectre of a power vacuum in mind, a “survival protocol” designed to give the system the capacity to continue even at a moment of maximum shock.
Khamenei also denied that Iran or its allied forces were responsible for attacks against Turkiye and Oman.
Those were “false flag” incidents used by Iran’s enemy to “sow discord among neighbours, and it may occur in other countries as well”, he claimed.
The Turkish Ministry of National Defence last week said NATO air defences intercepted a ballistic missile launched from Iran. Two people were killed in Oman after drones came down in the Sohar province.
The supreme leader also called on Afghanistan and Pakistan to end their fighting and said he stood ready to assist.
“We consider our eastern neighbours to be very close to us”, the supreme leader said. “I appeal to our two brotherly countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to establish better relations with each other … and I myself am ready to take the necessary actions.”
The neighbouring countries agreed to a temporary “pause” in hostilities during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr this week, after weeks of deadly violence.