(SeaPRwire) –   Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has remained in hiding for close to three months amid rising tensions with the United States — a disappearance that counterterrorism analysts note mirrors the final years of al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.

This comparison emerges against the backdrop of a high-stakes standoff between Washington and Tehran that prompted President Donald Trump to call off a planned strike on May 19. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Trump said he was “no hurry” to take action.

For his part, Khamenei appeared to share three posts to his official X account on May 18, but has still not made any public appearances.

“For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States has subjected Tehran to the same measures it deployed against al-Qaeda and ISIS over two decades,” counterterrorism expert Dr. Omar Mohammed told Digital.

“The U.S. has forced its leader into the exact same state of operational invisibility that bin Laden lived under for 10 years in Abbottabad,” he added.

“Both Mojtaba Khamenei and bin Laden came into their positions in the aftermath of an American operation, and both reacted the same way: by removing themselves entirely from public view,” Mohammed said, before going on to note that bin Laden “stopped releasing time-stamped videos around 2007 and only shared audio messages delivered in person by couriers.”

Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in the late 1980s and was the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks targeting the United States.

Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden evaded capture for a full decade by sheltering in a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

To avoid Western electronic surveillance, he erased all of his digital footprint and relied solely on a network of in-person couriers, said Mohammed, an expert with the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

U.S. intelligence eventually traced one of those couriers back to the compound, leading to the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that resulted in the al Qaeda leader’s death.

“Bin Laden survived without sending any electronic communications out of the Abbottabad compound. All messages were carried by hand by two trusted couriers, the Kuwaiti brothers,” Mohammed said.

“Bin Laden stayed hidden for the rest of his life because the moment he made a public appearance, he would be killed. Mojtaba faces the exact same set of incentives. Mojtaba Khamenei will not come out of hiding,” he said.

“The key lesson from Abbottabad, which Tehran will have studied in close detail, is that the safest hiding spot is not a cave in Tora Bora, but a walled compound in a garrison town,” Mohammed added, referencing how U.S. forces targeted bin Laden in the cave complex before he managed to escape.

Mohammed also noted that bin Laden lived roughly a mile away from Pakistan’s top military academy, hiding in plain sight behind tall concrete walls and barbed wire.

“The logical equivalent locations in Iran are hardened sites located underneath or adjacent to IRGC facilities,” Mohammed added, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and potential places where Khamenei could be sheltering.

As previously reported by Digital, one of Khamenei’s few recent communications was an X post declaring a “holy war,” framing the geopolitical conflict as a mandatory religious obligation.

“This is a religious leader calling for sacred war against America and the Jews from an undisclosed location, because his enemies have publicly vowed to kill him the moment he is spotted,” Mohammed said, describing the narrative as “the bin Laden template, almost line for line.”

Mohammed also suggested that Khamenei’s retreat into the shadows marks a historic turning point for Washington and the future of the Iranian regime.

His predecessor and father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on February 28 in a targeted U.S.-Israeli airstrike in Tehran during Operation Epic Fury.

“This regime that projected its power for 47 years through a single, visible Supreme Leader at the Friday prayer pulpit can no longer present that figure when needed,” he said, calling the development a “strategic milestone.”

“Predecessors killed by U.S. strikes and successors who cannot show their faces. Real power is exercised by the security apparatus, rather than by the nominal figurehead.”

“Right now one side is announcing operations across three continents through its president; the other is governed on paper by a man whose own population has no idea where he is or what condition he is in,” Mohammed said.

“This contrast also relates to the public optics of leadership during this war,” he added.