North Korea Says It Respects Iran’s Selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader
Yemen Herald News 
North Korea publicly endorsed Iran’s selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader in March 2026, becoming one of the few governments to offer Tehran unqualified backing during the leadership transition that followed the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The statement was issued by a spokesperson for North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on 11 March 2026.
Pyongyang framed the endorsement in terms of sovereignty rather than ideology. The spokesperson said North Korea respected the right and choice of the Iranian people to elect their supreme leader, and described the decision of Iran’s Assembly of Experts as an internal matter for Iran alone. The same statement strongly condemned what it called aggressive actions by the United States and Israel, accusing both governments of unlawfully attacking Iran and of undermining regional and global stability.
The transition Pyongyang was responding to had moved unusually fast by the standards of the Islamic Republic. Ali Khamenei, who had held the post since 1989, was killed on 28 February 2026 in joint United States and Israeli strikes at the opening of the war. The Assembly of Experts, the clerical body constitutionally responsible for choosing and supervising the supreme leader, convened from 3 March and settled on a successor on 8 March, with the appointment announced publicly on 9 March.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the late leader’s son, is a mid-ranking cleric who had never held formal state office. He had nonetheless been discussed as a possible successor for years, in part because of his close relationships within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and his role in his father’s office. His elevation drew criticism from Iranian opposition figures abroad, who characterised it as hereditary succession in a system that has always rejected dynastic rule, and it was received cautiously in most Western capitals.
Against that backdrop, North Korea’s statement stood out for its warmth. Pyongyang and Tehran have maintained a working relationship for decades, built on shared isolation from the Western-led sanctions architecture and on documented cooperation in missile technology dating to the 1980s. Both governments face layered United Nations and unilateral sanctions, and both have long argued that international non-proliferation enforcement is applied selectively. The March statement fitted a pattern in which each side offers rhetorical support when the other comes under military or diplomatic pressure.
The endorsement also served North Korea’s own purposes. By condemning strikes on a state’s leadership as unlawful, Pyongyang was implicitly defending a principle it has invoked in relation to itself: that decapitation strikes against a government are illegitimate regardless of the target. North Korean state media has repeatedly cited the fates of governments in Iraq and Libya as justification for retaining nuclear weapons, and the killing of a sitting head of state by outside powers gave that argument fresh material.
The Assembly of Experts is composed of clerics elected by popular vote for eight-year terms, and its deliberations are not public. That opacity has historically made succession one of the least predictable elements of the Iranian system, and the compressed timetable in March 2026 left little room for the kind of internal bargaining that observers had long expected. Alireza Arafi, a senior seminary figure and assembly member, was among the clerics whose names circulated in commentary about the process.
Iran’s constitution vests the supreme leader with authority over the armed forces, the judiciary and state broadcasting, and gives the office the final word on foreign and security policy. A change in that seat therefore matters well beyond Iran’s borders, particularly for governments across the Gulf and the wider region that were at the time absorbing missile and drone attacks attributed to Tehran.
Reporting by specialist outlets noted that earlier North Korean statements on the war had condemned the American attacks without directly mentioning Ali Khamenei’s death, a caution Pyongyang set aside once the succession was settled. The 11 March statement addressed both the transition and the strikes in a single text, indicating that the North Korean leadership had decided the new arrangement in Tehran was stable enough to be worth associating itself with publicly.
International reaction to the appointment was otherwise mixed. Governments across the Middle East, Europe and Asia responded with a range of positions from formal acknowledgement to open scepticism, and several declined to comment on the legitimacy of the process. Iranian state media presented the succession as orderly and constitutional, while critics abroad questioned whether an assembly meeting under wartime conditions could function normally.
For Yemen, the identity of Iran’s supreme leader carries practical weight. Tehran’s relationship with the Houthi authorities in Sanaa runs through the office of the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guard structures answerable to it, and any change at the top raises questions in Yemeni politics about continuity of support. Yemeni government officials have consistently accused Iran of supplying weapons and technical assistance to the Houthis, a charge Tehran denies while acknowledging political and what it describes as advisory ties.
No shift in Iranian policy toward Yemen was announced in the weeks after the succession, and the war between Iran, Israel and the United States continued. North Korea did not indicate that its support extended beyond diplomatic statements, and neither Pyongyang nor Tehran announced any new agreement at the time.
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