20 May 2026
After the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, US President Donald Trump mused that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country, the Times reported.
“To say that Mr Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement,” the newspaper said (The New York Times reported).
“While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.”
The newspaper noted, however, that in a 2019 interview, Ahmadinejad praised President Trump and argued for a rapprochement between Iran and the US.
“Mr Trump is a man of action,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying. “He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted.”
The Times said Trump was relishing the success of the special forces raid that kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, to work with the White House, and believed the same model could be replicated in Iran.
‘A jailbreak operation’
However, the US-Israeli plan, which Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, “quickly went awry”, according to the US officials who spoke to the Times.
Ahmadinejad was reportedly wounded on the first day of the war by an Israeli strike on his home in Tehran, which was intended to free him from house arrest, American officials told the Times. Ahmadinejad survived the strike, they said, but after the near-miss, he changed his mind about the regime change plan, and he has not been located since.
An article in the Atlantic in March said the attack on the house was “in effect a jailbreak operation”, citing anonymous associates of Ahmadinejad.
It added: “People close to Mr Ahmadinejad have been accused of having too close ties to the West, or even spying for Israel.”
Notes
05 Oct 2009
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reportedly born into a Jewish family which converted to Islam when he was four years old. The British newspaper ‘Daily Telegraph’ reports that Ahmadinejad’s original family name was Sabourjian, which in Iran is officially listed as a Jewish name, meaning ‘cloth weaver’. The newspaper published a picture of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during last year’s election campaign, in a way that shows his family’s previous name. Ahmadinejad never denied that his family changed its name when it moved to Tehran in the 1950’s. However he has never stated the family’s original name.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/ahmadinejad-more-jewish-roots-surface-n6cv8ycx
October 5, 2009 08:55
Claims have resurfaced about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s possible Jewish heritage.
A close-up of Mr Ahmadinejad holding up his identity card has been released, showing that the Iranian President’s previous name was Saburjian.
The Jewish Chronicle reported in July that Iranian blogger Dr Mehdi Khazali was detained after writing on his website earlier this year for writing about the name change from Saburjian, a name thought to be Jewish in origin.
The name is thought to derive from “weaver of the Sabour”, the word for a tallit in Persian and the name is on the list of Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.
The family is thought to have changed their name to Ahmadinejad after converting to Islam.
During the election campaign, reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi also challenged Ahmadinejad in a live TV debate to give his full name.