By Parisa Hafezi and Angus McDowall
DUBAI, March 9 (Reuters) - Iran's new supreme leader faces a massive external assault and growing internal anger at a time when the backing of the diehard ideologues who supported his predecessors is less clear than before.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who has deep influence inside Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and their vast business networks, survived the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran in which his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed more than a week
ago.
State TV aired footage of supporters of the Islamic Republic celebrating in the streets after he was selected by a hardline clerical council late on Sunday.
Yet Reuters interviews with three members of the Guards' volunteer militia, the Basij, as well as ordinary Iranians, officials, insiders and political analysts, point to a much narrower support base than the Islamic Republic once enjoyed.
"The strategy in choosing a hardliner as the new leader would be to consolidate the base, but they're ending up with an increasingly small circle of supporters," said Ali Ansari, a modern history professor at the University of St Andrews in the UK.
"And the longer this goes on, the more it will all fray at the edges," he said.
The Islamic Republic emerged from a 1979 revolution backed by millions of Iranians. But decades of rule marked by corruption, repression and mismanagement have thinned that support, alienating many ordinary people.
Still, a core of loyalists remains — people who repeatedly show up at the ballot box to back the Islamic system and who turn out on the streets to crush opposition protests.
"I am so happy that he (Mojtaba Khamenei) is our new leader. It was a slap in the face to our enemies who thought the system will collapse with the killing of his father. Our late leader's path will continue," said university student Zahra Mirbagheri, 21, from Tehran.
Highly organised and able to mobilise quickly, the loyalists still pose a major obstacle to any U.S. or Israeli hopes of effecting regime change.
"We have given many martyrs. They have sacrificed themselves for our leader. Now we must show that the path of the leader Khamenei continues," said Mahdi Rastegari, 32, a religion teacher and member of the Basij.
"We will even give our lives for him," he said.
EBBING SUPPORT
U.S. President Donald Trump had earlier rejected Mojtaba as a candidate to be Iran's new supreme leader, and Israel has said it would target whoever leads Iran. Asked by the Times of Israel about the naming of Mojtaba, Trump said only: "We'll see what happens."
In the last presidential election, the most hardline candidate, Saeed Jalili, won some 9 million votes in the first round and 13 million in the second, according to official results, a fraction of the more than 61 million Iranians eligible to vote.
Yet the continued bombardment has given rise to fears of chaos and oppression amongst those who hope for change.
"The Guards and the system are still powerful. They have tens of thousands of forces ready to fight to keep this regime in place. We, the people, have nothing," said Babak, 34, a businessman in Arak who asked to keep his family name secret.
NETWORK OF CONTROL
With their leader killed on the first day of the war and cracks emerging within the country's hierarchy, the hardliners' support for the Islamic Republic will now be tested like never before.
Men like the Basij member Rastegari represent a network of power extending from the supreme leader's now bombed-out office in central Tehran to every village and city neighbourhood.
Every night since Khamenei's death, hardliners have held state-backed mourning ceremonies for him despite the bombs raining down across the country.
Among their number are people ready to die as martyrs for their fervent belief in rule by what they see as a divinely guided cleric, and those with more mercenary motives who have benefited from their status as public supporters of the system.
Another Basij member, Ali Mohammad Hosseini, goes from work at his father's grocery shop in the Shi'ite Muslim seminary city of Qom to spend his evenings manning checkpoints to deter any flashes of public dissent.
"The most important issue is preserving the regime, which is what the Americans are targeting," the 29-year-old said, saying he would support whichever cleric replaced Khamenei as a "religious duty" that he was prepared to die for.
That degree of commitment is not universal, however. Another Basij member, who asked to give only his first name Hassan, and his location in the Shi'ite shrine city of Mashhad, said he had doubts the Islamic Republic would survive.
"We need to be realistic," he said, pointing to continued U.S. pressure and the ruinous aftermath of pulverising airstrikes.
Members of the Basij and others who demonstrate loyalty to the system have for decades enjoyed privileges including preferential places at university, job offers and subsidised bank loans - but a collapsing economy could end such perks.
"We do not even have airports any more. No ports. How are they going to rebuild this economy?" Hassan, 29, said.
(Reporting by Parisa Hafezi; Writing by Angus McDowall;Editing by Ros Russell and Philippa Fletcher)
