Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei hiding like bin Laden, expert tells Fox

Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei spent nearly three months in hiding as tensions with the United States escalated; Counterterrorism analysts say the disappearance reflects the final years of Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.

The comparison comes amid a critical standoff between Washington and Tehran that led President Donald Trump to call off a planned attack on May 19. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters he was “in no rush.”

Meanwhile, Khamenei appeared to make three posts on his official X account on May 18, but remained out of the public eye.

“For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States has done to Tehran what it has done to Al Qaeda and ISIS for two decades,” the counterterrorism expert said. Dr. Omer Muhammad he told Fox News Digital.

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“The United States has dragged its leader into the same operational invisibility that bin Laden experienced in Abbottabad for 10 years,” he added.

“Both Mojtaba Khamenei and bin Laden inherited their status thanks to an American operation, and both responded in kind: by ending their public presence,” Mohammed said, adding that bin Laden “stopped publishing videos dated around 2007 and limited himself to hand-held voice messages.”

Bin Laden founded Al Qaeda in the late 1980s and masterminded the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

After the US invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden evaded capture for a decade by hiding in a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Mohammed, an expert at the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said he cut off his digital footprint and relied solely on his network of physical couriers to avoid Western electronic surveillance.

U.S. intelligence eventually tracked one of these couriers to the compound, resulting in the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader.

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Portrait of former Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed in a daring raid by SEAL Team 6 in Pakistan in 2011. (Photo: Stephane Ruet/Sygma via Getty Images)

“Bin Laden escaped from the Abbottabad compound without any cables. The communication was handled manually by two reliable couriers, the Kuwaiti brothers,” Mohammed said. he said.

“Bin Laden remained hidden for the rest of his life because the moment he was revealed was the moment he died. Mojtaba’s incentives point in the same direction. Mojtaba Khamenei will not come forward,” he said.

“The lesson of Abbottabad, which Tehran will study closely, is that the safest hiding place is not a cave in Tora Bora, but a walled compound in a garrison town,” Mohammed added, recalling how US forces targeted bin Laden at the cave complex before he escaped.

Bin Laden also lived about a mile away from Pakistan’s top military academy and was clearly hiding behind high concrete walls and barbed wire, Mohammed noted.

“The logical Iranian equivalents are fortified sites located under or next to IRGC facilities,” Mohammed added, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and possible locations where Khamenei could be found.

As previously reported by Fox News Digital, one of Khamenei’s several recent communications was an X post declaring a “holy war,” framing the geopolitical conflict as a mandatory religious obligation.

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“I captured him before he captured me,” President Donald Trump said after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior leaders were killed in the US-Israeli Israeli attack on Tehran, called Operation Epic Rage. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images; Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Describing the narrative as “the bin Laden template, almost line by line,” Muhammad said, “This is a religious leader calling for holy war against America and the Jews from an undisclosed location, because his enemies have clearly sworn to kill him on sight.” he said.

Mohammed also suggested that Khamenei’s retreat into the shadows was a turning point for the future of Washington and the Iranian regime.

His predecessor and father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike in Tehran during Operation Epic Rage on February 28.

“This regime, which has projected its power through a single Religious Leader on the Friday prayer rostrum for 47 years, can no longer produce this figure on demand,” he said, describing this as a “strategic turning point”.

“Predecessors killed by US attacks and successors unable to show their faces. Real power is wielded by a security apparatus rather than so-called puppets.”

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“Now, one side announces its operations on three continents through its president; the other side is ruled by a man whose population on paper is unknown where his population is and which state he is in,” Mohammed said.

“The opposition is also about the optics of leadership during this war,” he added.