Iran's new Supreme Leader uses a Dutch VPN

Mojtabe Khamenei, the newly appointed Supreme Leader of Iran, has several social media channels on X, posting in different languages. According to the social media platform, two of these channels are based in the Netherlands, indicating that Iran’s Supreme Leader uses a VPN connection hosted via Dutch servers, BNR discovered.

Mojtabe Khamenei succeeded his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was slain in American and Israeli attacks.

X has been displaying the location of a user’s channel for several months, prompted by a BBC discovery that several major American political influencers are based outside the United States. X now uses IP addresses to determine where the user connects.

Two of Mojtaba Khamenei's official channels - the one that posts in English and the one that posts in Spanish - indicate that he is based in the Netherlands. That likely means that Khamenei, or his social media team, uses a Dutch VPN, creating Dutch IP addresses for the Iranian Supreme Leader.

It is quite remarkable for Khamenei to use a VPN connection, given the Iranian regime’s tendency to virtually paralyze the internet when it doesn’t want information and images leaking out of Iran. The regime did this following the Israeli and American attacks, as well as during large-scale protests in the country, in which the regime killed thousands of demonstrators. VPN connections are useful for bypassing certain regime blockades.

It seems that Khamenei, or his social media team, is using a VPN connection via the Netherlands to bypass his own regime’s blockade of X, which has been in effect since 2009.