Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been in hiding for nearly three months as tensions with the United States escalate – a disappearance that counterterrorism analysts say reflects the final years of Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
The comparison comes amid a serious standoff between Washington and Tehran, which prompted President Donald Trump to suspend a planned May 19 attack. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters he was “in no hurry.”
Khamenei, meanwhile, appears to have shared three posts on his official X account on May 18, but remains out of the public eye.
“For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States is doing to Tehran what it has done to Al Qaeda and ISIS for two decades,” counterterrorism expert Dr. Omar Mohammed told Fox News Digital.
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Portrait of Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
(Fox News)
He added: “The United States has pushed its leaders into the same kind of stealth operations that bin Laden lived in Abbottabad for a decade.”
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“Both Khamenei and bin Laden inherited their positions on the back of U.S. operations, and both responded in the same way: no longer publicly existing,” Mohammed said, before adding that bin Laden “stopped releasing outdated videos around 2007 and limited himself to hand-carried audio messages.”
Bin Laden founded Al Qaeda in the late 1980s and planned the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, bin Laden hid in a heavily guarded compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, evading capture for a decade.
To avoid Western electronic surveillance, Mohammed cut off his digital footprint and relied exclusively on a network of physical messengers, said Mohammad, an expert on anti-Semitism at George Washington University’s Project on Extremism.
U.S. intelligence eventually tracked one of the couriers to the compound and ultimately killed the al-Qaeda leader in a 2011 SEAL raid.
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Portrait of former Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed in 2011 during a daring raid by Pakistani SEAL Team Six.
Mohammed said: “Bin Laden survived without any cables in the Abbottabad compound. Communications were conducted manually by two Kuwaiti brothers who were trusted couriers.”
“Bin Laden spent the rest of his life in hiding because the moment he emerged was the moment he died. The same goes for Mojtaba’s motives. Mojtaba Khamenei will not appear,” he said.
“Tehran will carefully study the lessons learned from Abbottabad that the safest hiding places are not the caves of Tora Bora but within the walls of garrisoned towns,” Mohammad added, recalling how U.S. forces targeted bin Laden in caves before he escaped.
Mohammed noted that bin Laden also lived about a mile from Pakistan’s top military academy, hiding in plain sight behind high concrete walls and barbed wire.
“The logical Iranian counterpart is a fortified site beneath or next to an IRGC facility,” Mohammad added, referring to the location where the IRGC and possibly Khamenei are located.
As Fox News Digital previously reported, one of Khamenei’s few recent communications was an X post declaring “jihad,” treating geopolitical conflicts as a mandatory religious obligation.
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“This is a religious leader calling for a holy war against America and the Jewish people in a secret location because his enemies have publicly vowed to kill him on sight,” Muhammad said, describing the narrative as “a bin Laden template, almost line for line.”
Mohammed also said Khamenei’s retreat marked a watershed in the future of Washington and the Iranian regime.
His predecessor and father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in a targeted U.S.-Israeli airstrike on Tehran on February 28 during Operation Epic Fury.
“For 47 years this regime has demonstrated its power through a visible supreme leader from the pulpit on Fridays, but now such numbers can no longer be delivered on demand,” he said, calling it a “strategic milestone.”
“The predecessors were killed by US air strikes, and the successors could not show up. Real power is exercised by security agencies, not nominal puppets.”
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“Now you have one side through a president announcing operations on three continents; the other side is ruled by a man who rules on paper while his own people are not sure where he is or what status he is in,” Mohammed said.
“The contrast is also relevant to the performance of leadership during this war,” he added.
Original source of the article: Mojtaba Khamenei uses ‘Bin Laden template’ to survive, learns from Abbottabad: Analyst