On Sunday a statement went out over the name of Iran's supreme leader. It backed Hezbollah, demanded a "complete and unconditional" end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, and closed with a line about there being no path forward except jihad and resistance. It was posted to X, in reply to a letter of allegiance from the group's secretary-general.

The same day, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel told the Iranian news agency ISNA that Mojtaba Khamenei "is not communicating with any party or individual for specific reasons." He did not say what the reasons were. He said Mojtaba is like his father "in every way," and that he hoped he was in good health. Haddad-Adel is his father-in-law.

Both things happened on 26 July. Neither has been reconciled by anyone.

Iran has now been at war for five months, and for five months the man at the top of its system has not been seen by anybody outside a closed circle. No appearance. No voice recording. No photograph. He took the office in March and has governed since entirely on paper.

What is known

Ali Khamenei was killed on 28 February, the first day of the American and Israeli strikes on Iran. He was 86 and had run the country for nearly 36 years. His son was named to succeed him in March.

Since then the record of Mojtaba Khamenei's rule consists of documents.

In June a statement in his name addressed the memorandum of understanding Tehran had signed with Washington. He held a different view of the deal, it said, but approved it once President Masoud Pezeshkian took responsibility for it as chairman of the Supreme National Security Council. That admission set off the hardliners who had opposed the agreement, and the argument has not closed since.

On 11 July, after his father's burial in Mashhad, state television read out a statement pledging revenge. "Vengeance is the will of our nation and must inevitably be carried out," it said, and then a sentence that reads differently now than it did then: "The matter depends neither on my personal existence nor on that of other officials. Whether we are present or not, it will come to pass."

On 18 July came a warning of unforgettable lessons if the United States kept attacking. On 19 July, a decree calling for "sacred unity" and instructing Iranians and their officials to avoid division and political disputes, because the enemy "must not detect any sign of weakness from us." Then Sunday's post about Lebanon.

The burial itself is the hardest fact in the file. Ali Khamenei was interred in Mashhad on 10 July after nearly a week of ceremonies in Iran and in Iraq. His son and successor attended none of them.

His brothers did. Masoud, Mostafa and Meysam Khamenei were at the service in Tehran on 5 July, the BBC reported, alongside President Pezeshkian and the Revolutionary Guards chief, Ahmad Vahidi. Iranian authorities expected 12 to 20 million people at the ceremonies and called it the funeral of the century. It was, by every account of it, carefully choreographed. The one absence nobody choreographed was his.

What is claimed

On 13 July, in a Fox News interview, Donald Trump said Iran's military leaders had all been killed and that Ali Khamenei's son was "90% gone."

That is an assessment from the government currently bombing Iran, offered without evidence, and it sits next to the rest of what the president said in the same breath. He named the dead leader as Khomeini, who died in 1989.

Anadolu Ajansı has reported that Mojtaba is said to be recovering from injuries suffered in the airstrike that killed his father. The BBC has described talk that he was disfigured in it as rumor. TurkishPress has found nothing that establishes either, and neither should be read as an explanation for his absence.

Absence is not evidence, either. Israel has threatened to assassinate him, a threat the BBC noted as the backdrop to his absence from the funeral, and a man in that position has ordinary reasons to stay underground.

Who is visibly in charge

While the office has been silent, the commanders have not been.

Ahmad Vahidi has run the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps since the opening strikes, and was at the funeral in Tehran. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr took over as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in March, replacing Ali Larijani, who was assassinated, and Al Jazeera reports that Pezeshkian made the appointment under pressure from senior Guard commanders.

Al Jazeera, reporting from Tehran this month, described a security clique running the war and holding a single line on the Strait of Hormuz, with the president lobbying for diplomacy from a weaker position despite formally chairing the security council. Those commanders have appeared in public repeatedly, including at the funeral their leader missed.

That is the arrangement Iran has been fighting under. The men making the daily decisions about ships in the strait are visible and named. The authority in whose name they act is neither.

What is not known

Whether Mojtaba Khamenei is well. Whether he is directing anything. What his father-in-law meant by specific reasons. Whether Sunday's post came from him or from an office writing in his name.

None of that is settled, and this piece does not settle it. What can be said is narrower and strange enough on its own. A state fighting the United States, closing and opening a shipping lane the world depends on, has a supreme leader who has issued statement after statement and appeared not once. The man who says he is not talking to anybody is his wife's father.