The number that matters is seven: seven reported meetings used to make an invisible supreme leader legible. Mahjoob Zweiri writes in Al Jazeera that since Mojtaba Khamenei succeeded his father, Ali Khamenei, in March, he has governed without public appearance or recorded voice, issuing written statements and decrees while others testify that he is alive and deciding.
The mechanism is substitution. For nearly 37 years, Ali Khamenei’s authority was performed directly: speeches that set red lines, audiences with commanders, elites and ordinary Iranians. The son came to power after the February 28 strike that killed his father and, Zweiri reports, was himself injured; sources close to him quoted by Reuters advised no appearances and no audio for fear of tracking. The state therefore replaced presence with paper and intermediaries.
That design has a built-in credibility tax. Meetings announced in May and August, Zweiri argues, mostly proved life and continuity: one with President Masoud Pezeshkian and Ali Abdollahi, then head of Khatam al-Anbiya, and another later with Pezeshkian. They established that someone could still sign. They did not yet establish a machine for making a war-or-peace decision.
October changed the tempo. After commanders killed in the war were replaced, Khamenei in August made his military adviser Mohsen Rezaei his representative on the Supreme National Security Council; Rezaei later became its secretary. Six military appointments followed, including Abdollahi as chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, Ahmad Vahidi as Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander and Ali Azmaei as IRGC Navy commander. Abdollahi was also told to complete absorbing the General Staff into Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters.
The first reported meeting with that rebuilt military leadership was announced on October 31. Abdollahi, army commander Amir Hatami and Vahidi reportedly briefed Khamenei on readiness in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman. In Zweiri’s reading, the agenda had moved from reconstruction to operation: not merely showing a chain of command, but checking what it could do.
The consultation track shadows the mediation track almost day for day. On October 20, Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, brought a Qatari-Pakistani compromise proposal to Tehran; Arab media reports described unannounced nuclear inspections in exchange for Iran receiving interest on funds frozen in Qatar. The next day came the announced meeting with Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, described as Iran’s chief negotiator.
On October 26 Munir returned with Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin. Those talks produced an understanding that regional security belonged to the region’s own states, and Rezaei said Tehran had sent Washington a proposal on the Strait of Hormuz with a seven-day deadline. A day later Khamenei was reported to meet Rezaei, who had received a letter from US Vice President JD Vance.
On October 30 Qatari mediators held 12 hours of talks in Tehran coordinated with the White House, after US envoy Tom Barrack suggested an initial understanding was close. Khamenei’s meeting with military commanders was announced the following day. The sequence implies a loop: outside proposal, inside consultation, public signal.
The two messages
The signals run in parallel rather than converging. With Rezaei, Khamenei insisted on Iran’s conditions for ending the war, escaping the debilitating state of “neither war nor peace” and managing the Strait of Hormuz. To commanders, he demanded immediate retaliation against any threat without geographical limits, an expanded list of US and Israeli targets, and Iranian control over when any renewed confrontation ends.
Read narrowly, that is deterrence plus bargaining. Read together, it defines boundaries instead of choosing a course: reject an intolerable continuation of “neither war nor peace” at one end; prepare to widen the war if attacks resume at the other. Between them sit four options in Zweiri’s account: a settlement on Iranian terms through Ghalibaf, Rezaei and mediators, or continued mutual pressure while shoring up the domestic front.
The opening gap remains quantifiable as sequence, not sentiment. Washington wants nuclear concessions before negotiations resume; Tehran wants the naval blockade lifted, frozen assets released and oil exports restored first. Each side is asking the other to pay before talking, which is why mediation can produce understandings around the edges while the core file stays frozen.
The wording matters as much as the calendar. Khamenei spoke of conditions “set by the country’s officials”, not by himself. The phrase spreads ownership across institutions and preserves a later option to endorse an outcome as consensus or disown it as someone else’s error.
The 2015 echo
The resemblance to the run-up to the July 14, 2015 nuclear agreement is structural. A secret Muscat channel opened with Ali Khamenei’s approval; on September 17, 2013 he told IRGC commanders about “heroic flexibility”; in June 2015 he published red lines and in October issued conditional approval; the nuclear file moved from the Supreme National Security Council to the Foreign Ministry under Mohammad Javad Zarif once the political decision had Been made.
The differences are in compression and cost. The earlier process took around two years under sanctions; the current consultations were compressed into four announced meetings within 11 days in October, amid armed confrontation, a naval blockade and the approach of the November 3 US midterm elections. A faster clock raises the value of signals and reduces the time to verify them.
The cast has also changed. Diplomats led the old file; now Ghalibaf and Rezaei, both with IRGC backgrounds, are central. The backchannel geography has shifted from Oman toward Qatar and the countries associated with the Mecca Agreement signed on August 7. Where “heroic flexibility” was sold to commanders as preparation for agreement, current conditions sit beside an expanded target list.
Trust deficit
The mistrust has a dated stack. Zweiri frames Washington’s view through 1979, Tehran’s through the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018, and the present through the wars of June 2025 and February 2026. Each layer lowers the value of technical fixes because verification has to cover intentions that paper cannot bind.
So the consultation pattern resembles 2013 in form but not function. Then it prepared the ground for negotiations; now it prepares a choice between negotiation and escalation. That distinction is the whole story: the same choreography of red lines, delegated negotiators and military reassurance can point toward signatures or toward targets.
The system appears to be functioning even while the leader’s presence is only reported. But announcements without photographs or precise time and place create the paradox Zweiri identifies: every message meant to dispel doubt produces more of it. Decisions may be real while the audience cannot audit the decider.
The next number to watch is not another meeting count. It is whether one of the parallel messages gets sacrificed: either the expanded target list goes quiet for long enough to test a deal, or the conditions for lifting the blockade, unfreezing assets and restoring oil exports move before nuclear concessions. Until one side changes sequence, seven meetings describe a system that can decide, not a decision.