Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is taking a page out of slain al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden’s playbook by living a life without telecommunications and instead opting to rely on trusted couriers, according to a report quoting a counterterrorism expert.
The Supreme Leader, who assumed the position after Israel and US air raids killed his father, Ali Khamenei, has spent three months in hiding and has yet to appear before the public.
According to counterterrorism expert Omar Mohammad, the Supreme Leader, like bin Laden, achieved their “status on the back of American operation, and both responded the same way: by ceasing to exist publicly.”
"For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States has done to Tehran what it spent two decades doing to al-Qaeda and ISIS," counterterrorism expert Dr. Omar Mohammed told Fox News Digital. "The U.S. has driven its leader into the same kind of operational invisibility that bin Laden lived in for 10 years in Abbottabad," he added.
Bin Laden, who masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, evaded capture for almost a decade by hiding inside a fortified house in Abbottabad. He ditched phones and all electronic systems that enabled surveillance and relied on a network of physical couriers. The US troops managed to locate him through the courier.
According to Mohammed, Bin Laden survived with no cables out of the Abbottabad compound. “Communications were carried by hand by two trusted couriers, the Kuwaiti brothers," he said, adding that Bin Laden stayed hidden for the rest of his life because the moment he surfaced was the moment he died. “Mojtaba’s incentives point the same way. Mojtaba Khamenei won’t emerge," he said.
"The Abbottabad lesson, which Tehran will have studied closely, is that the safest hiding place is not a cave in Tora Bora but a walled compound in a garrison town," Mohammed added.
He said Mojtaba is following the bin Laden template by calling for sacred war against America and the Jews, citing the recent posts put up by the Supreme Leader where he declared a "holy war," framing the geopolitical clash as a mandatory religious obligation.
Mohammed said he does this from an undisclosed location because his enemies have publicly vowed to kill him on sight. "This regime that for 47 years projected its power through a single visible Supreme Leader at the Friday prayer pulpit can no longer produce that figure on demand," he said, calling it a "strategic milestone."
