Iran’s new Supreme Leader may be close to death according to some reports, or he is already dead. A ghost who purportedly spoke from the darkness of a moving car to Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian, some reports claim. The Iranian President also claimed to have met him a second time. Mojtaba is a mystery cloaked in darkness as the regime craves spiritual credibility even as it may be on its last legs.

Mojtaba has been communicating through messages to his core team, some reports say. No one has seen him in human form since February 28 when US and Israeli attacks killed his father and former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But one thing is clear. He was seriously injured. The rest is a mystery, a secret Tehran’s mosaic military establistment that has delegated violence, is not letting out.

A revelation of the truth about his whereabouts or status about his health is likely to end the resistance-or-death plans laid out for close to five decades.

It is also likely to upend plans of the IRGC to exert leverge on the US using a narrow piece of waterway through which 20pc of oil flows from the region to the world.

For US President, the silent (or dead) Supreme Leader has presented a problem that he had helped create in the first place. Multiple talking heads in Iran make negotiations complicated and ‘duplicitous’ in his own words. Harsher economic sanctions may be the final resort but it will hurt the Iranian people more that than the entrenched elite. Ordinary Iranians have already been battered by decades of a war economy and the current conflict only makes it worse.

The Iranian establishment has threatened to widen the conflict but has been careful not to target the main enemy – Israel – for fear of the end coming sooner. Trump has shown he is willing to play the waiting game with Iran’s proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah already gasping for breath. Iraqi militias and the Houthi remain irritants in the what is Iran’s final game of survival. With friends like China and Russia turning the other way, and the Gulf states clearly antagonistic, the regime in Tehran may be clutching at straws as it spreads fear along the population.

The writing on the war is unclear with the ghost of a Supreme Leader leading a war that is Iran’s to lose.

The Persian civilization does not deserve this clerical revolution that has outlived its purpose and caused untold misery and deadly militaristion.

Iran’s missiles and the Mojtaba mystery are signs that a terror regime cannot be allowed to prevail.

An unpredictable US President may be the best solution to Iran’s duplicity. Confuse, confound and crack the head of the snake. Enough of the global appeasement of terror states. Is the UN listening? – editor@nrifocus.com