The mystery surrounding the condition of Mojtaba Khamenei, who recently replaced his slain father as Iran’s supreme leader but has not been seen since the Feb. 28 strikes, has CIA, Mossad and other intelligence agencies baffled, reports Axios.

Khamenei on Friday during Nowruz released a statement without any video or audio, as his continued absence fuels questions about his condition and whereabouts.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has claimed Mojtaba was "wounded and likely disfigured" in the strike that killed his father.

His absence has earned him the moniker "the cardboard ayatollah."

"We have no evidence that [Mojtaba] is really the one giving orders," a senior Israeli official told Axios.

"It's beyond weird. We don't think the Iranians would have gone through all this trouble to choose a dead guy as the supreme leader, but at the same time, we have no proof that he is taking the helm," a U.S. official said.

President Donald Trump said Friday that there are no leaders left in Iran to talk to about the ‌war, with military strikes continuing to target Iranian officials.

Mojtaba Khamenei in the message on Friday said Iranians have "dealt him (the enemy) a dizzying blow so that he now starts uttering contradictory words and nonsense.

"At the moment, due to the particular unity that has been created between you our compatriots — despite all the differences in religious, intellectual, cultural and political origins — the enemy has been defeated."

He also said that while the U.S. and Israel believed that after one or two days of attacks, the Iranian people would overthrow the government, but this was a "gross miscalculation."

The war was launched under "the delusion that if the pinnacle of the regime and certain influential military figures were to attain martyrdom, it would instill fear and despair in our dear people … and through this means, the dream of dominating Iran and subsequently dismembering it would be realized", he said.

Instead, "a fracture has emerged in the enemy," he added.

A U.S. official said the lack of a video message was a "big red flag.

"We would have expected to see Mojtaba too in some form. He didn't take advantage of the opportunity and tradition," the person added.

Raz Zimmt, director of the Iran Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told Axios there’s no evidence Mojtaba is not functioning.

"Under the current exceptional circumstances, one should not expect him to appear in public, and it is possible that his injury does not even allow him to release a recorded video in order not to expose to the public the severity of his condition," Zimmt said.

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