[Salon] Fwd: Iranian clerics call for Trump’s assassination - Guest Post by Akhtar Makoii

Iranian clerics call for Trump’s assassination ‘Religious duty’ to kill US president and Israeli PM ‘must not be neglected’, says Tehran’s Assembly of Experts Akhtar Makoii Iran’s most senior clerics have called for the assassination of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. In a 10-point statement, the Assembly of Experts said the killing of “the criminal American president” and “the wicked prime minister of the Zionist regime” was a religious duty. Assassinating the two leaders – whom they described as mahdour al-dam, or deserving of death – “must not be neglected under any circumstances”. The call to action came despite Washington and Tehran having signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the Middle East war, which broke out on Feb 28 with US-Israeli strikes on Iran. The 14-point pact allowed 60 days to negotiate a permanent truce and to resolve thorny issues including the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. However, days of tit-for-tat strikes in the Strait of Hormuz and Israel’s military actions in Lebanon have put the interim peace deal under pressure. In their call for Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu to be assassinated, the clerics wrote that avenging the blood of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed on the first day of the war, remained “paramount”. “It is obligatory upon any duty-bound person who gains access to these criminals to send them to hell,” they added. The language read like a religious edict but stopped short of a formal fatwa, which in Shia Islam is issued by an individual cleric in his own name rather than by a group. The Assembly of Experts is an 88-member body of clerics constitutionally tasked with choosing and supervising the supreme leader. Its premises in Qom and Tehran were bombed during the war, in what Iranian officials said was an effort to stop it from naming a successor to Khamenei. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was later chosen to replace him in a remote meeting. The statement shows how fractured the establishment has become. Only about 63 of the body’s members signed it, and the Assembly’s secretariat distanced itself hours later. Warning of US attack The clerics also pressed the government to keep the negotiations on a tight leash, warning that Washington was buying time to rearm. “The likelihood of a renewed attack after will be very high – the matters raised in the memorandum of understanding must be resolved within the stipulated 30-day and 60-day deadlines,” they wrote. They called on the Islamic Republic supporters to continue mass mobilisation on the streets “in the leader’s name”, saying “the people’s presence is necessary and decisive” for as long as Khamenei “deems it expedient”. The signatories also condemned the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as a “strategic error” and demanded Iran’s nuclear rights be excluded from talks. It was not the first time Iran had been linked to a threat against the US president. In 2024, weeks before a gunman shot and wounded Mr Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, US intelligence agencies said they had uncovered an Iranian plot to assassinate him – part of what Washington described as years of efforts to avenge the 2020 killing of Gen Qassim Soleimani, the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s overseas Quds Force. US officials found no link between that plot and the shooting. The clerics’ call came as Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, travelled to Qom to defend his peace agreement, telling seminary teachers it had been reached “in complete co-ordination” with the supreme leader and accusing domestic critics of waging a “psychological operation alongside hostile foreign media”. The peace process, meanwhile, has appeared to stall. Steve Witkoff, the US envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law, arrived in Doha to meet Qatari mediators to discuss the US-Iran negotiations, but there would be no high-level meeting between Washington and Tehran, Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday. Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, said Tehran had “no negotiating session at any level” planned with the American side. Mr Baghaei added that an Iranian technical delegation was travelling to Doha only to follow up on implementing the deal, including the release of frozen funds. Amid the turmoil, Mohammad Akbarzadeh, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s navy, was killed when his vehicle overturned on a road in southern Kerman province, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, without giving further details.