Iran, not Trump, will elect its new leader, top diplomat says

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says only Iranians will choose their next leader and urges Trump to apologise for past actions. Iran’s foreign minister said on Sunday that the Iranian people, not Donald Trump, will elect their new leader and demanded that the US president apologise for starting the war with Iran. “We allow nobody to interfere in our domestic affairs.

This is up to the Iranian people to elect their new leader,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” after Trump on Thursday asserted he should have a role in picking Iran’s next supreme leader. Araghchi also said Trump “should apologise to people of the region and the Iranian people for the killings and destruction they have done against us.” Vehicles move along a highway past a war memorial statue and a billboard depicting Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was killed in an air strike on February 28. Iran was preparing to reveal its new supreme leader on Sunday, after US-Israeli air strikes destroyed fuel dumps and triggered fires that choked much of Tehran in a thick blanket of smoke.

The clerical body tasked with choosing a successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — killed just over a week ago in the strikes that triggered the war in the Middle East — has reached a decision, but not yet named the new leader. “The vote to appoint the leader has taken place and the leader has been chosen,” said Ahmad Alamolhoda, a member of the Assembly of Experts, as quoted by Iran’s Mehr news agency. Alamolhoda said the secretariat of the body would announce the name later.

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Other assembly members confirmed a decision was made, with one suggesting the son of the late leader would take the post. Israel, meanwhile, issued a stark warning that its forces would not hesitate to target the new chief and members of the Assembly of Experts that met to confirm him. Its reach was underlined by two new operations overnight — strikes against fuel dumps in and around Tehran, and an attack on a hotel in the heart of Lebanon’s capital Beirut that targeted suspected Iranian commanders. As the war extended into its ninth day, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had enough supplies to continue their aerial drone and missile war over the Middle East for up to six months.

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