Tehran's streets carry a new face this week: three-storey banners showing every supreme leader since 1979, the newest image being that of Mojtaba Khamenei, who took over after his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on 28 February. The younger Khamenei, said to have been badly hurt in the same strike, has vanished from view, leaving citizens to guess whether he is alive or still in charge.
The silence coincides with a brittle truce that has paused, but not ended, the missile duels between Iran and the United States. Residents interviewed by the BBC's Lyse Doucet say they are less interested in the portraits than in whether Washington will honour the undeclared cease-fire and lift sanctions that have throttled the economy. Grocery prices have tripled since the war began, and lines for subsidised petrol now stretch for kilometres.
Doucet reports that shopkeepers along Jomhuri-ye Eslami Avenue openly question whether any deal struck with President Donald Trump's envoys can survive the next election cycle in either country. One pharmacist told her he has stopped reordering insulin because no supplier will guarantee delivery past June. Others have begun hoarding dollars, convinced that diplomacy will collapse again.
There is no official confirmation of Mojtaba's condition; state media last mentioned him on 2 March, saying only that he was "receiving treatment". His absence has fuelled rumours of a power struggle inside the Revolutionary Guard, whose top commanders have been meeting nightly in the former US embassy compound. Doucet notes that the capital's nightly blackout drills feel more relaxed this week, yet few residents venture outside after 9 pm.
Iranian diplomats in Muscat continue to trade messages with US counterparts through Omani mediators, but no timetable for face-to-face talks has been announced. Until Mojtaba reappears—or a successor is named—most Tehranis assume the pause in fighting is temporary.
A regime that once flooded the airwaves with its leader's every utterance now survives on a single blurred photograph, proof that in Tehran the most potent weapon is not a missile but the absence of information. By keeping Mojtaba hidden, the Revolutionary Guard buys time to decide whether the clerical succession can survive open negotiations with Washington or whether the war must resume to rally nationalist support.
This tactic mirrors the late-stage Soviet model: when Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko vanished from public view, the Kremlin continued to issue decrees in their names while the real struggle happened in the Central Committee corridors. Iran's difference is that its economy is already in free fall; the longer the leadership vacuum lasts, the faster the rial sinks and the more likely ordinary Iranians will blame not external enemies but the cloistered elites who refuse to show their faces.
For Nigeria and other oil-dependent states, the cost of this opacity is immediate: Brent crude has swung 8 % this week on rumours that Iranian exports might resume or that the Strait of Hormuz could close again, forcing Abuja to re-calculate every barrel of its 2025 budget benchmark. African importers of Iranian bitumen and urea face the same uncertainty—ships linger off Bandar Abbas because no one knows which faction will control the ports next week.
Watch the Omani channel: if the next round produces even a provisional sanctions relief timetable, expect a swift appearance by Mojtaba or a chosen stand-in; if the talks stall, the banners will stay up and the guns will likely speak again.
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