THE RANKS of Iran’s leadership are thinning. On the first night of America’s and Israel’s air strikes, several generals, the defence minister and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were all killed. This week Ali Larijani, the man who appeared to be running the country after that initial blitz, died in similar circumstances. So, too, did the two generals heading the Basij, a paramilitary force used to suppress internal dissent, and the intelligence minister. Given the disappearance of Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader (and the son of the previous one), who has not been seen in public since his appointment and is rumoured to have been badly injured, it is no longer clear who is calling the shots or naming successors to fill all the gaps in the leadership. The relentless assassinations are likely to make the regime more brittle—but they may also make it harder to bring America’s and Israel’s war on Iran to any sort of negotiated end.
Israel depicts the killings of senior Iranian officials as paving the way for the Islamic Republic’s overthrow or collapse. “We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,” Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said after Mr Larijani’s death was announced. Over two weeks into the war, Israel still seems to have excellent intelligence on the whereabouts of Iranian officials. It is also bombing bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s most elite fighting force. It has even hit street checkpoints manned by the Basij.
The assassinations appear to be designed “to progressively disintegrate the state”, as a former British intelligence officer puts it. However, Israeli intelligence assessments suggest the regime cannot be brought down by air strikes alone, but only in conjunction with internal dissent. They also contend that protesters will not take to the streets, as they did in huge numbers two months ago, while bombs are still falling. Much will hinge on who, if anyone, is in charge whenever the bombing abates.
Mr Larijani was unusual in that he straddled the three main pillars of the regime: the IRGC, Islamic clerics and the bureaucracy. He was the son, brother and son-in-law of senior ayatollahs and trained in a seminary. He fought with the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq war. He also served as culture minister and speaker of parliament.
He was hard to pin down ideologically. As head of state broadcasting he hounded reformists. Yet he also aligned himself with Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the pragmatic former president who led post-war reconstruction in the 1990s and pursued detente with the West. As a philosophy professor he taught the Enlightenment, specialising in the work of Immanuel Kant.
Moreover, Mr Larijani knew the levers of power. Abroad, he acted as an envoy for the supreme leader to China, the Gulf states and Russia. When Oman sought to broker a last-minute deal on the eve of war, it was Mr Larijani, for example, who set Iran’s negotiating parameters. Some saw him as the potential leader of a more pragmatic “second Islamic Republic” or even Iran’s counterpart to Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s vice-president, whom Mr Trump elevated to head of state. “They’ve removed the one person most likely to reach an accommodation,” says a veteran opposition figure.
There is a chance that another pragmatist might emerge from the internal jockeying now under way. Figures such as Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC commander and parliamentary speaker, or Hassan Rouhani, a former president and architect of Iran’s nuclear deal with America in 2015, could help make the regime more conciliatory. Neither is on America’s list of officials to be hunted down.
But hardliners may spy an opportunity. They had previously vetoed Mr Larijani’s candidacy for president. They are thought to want to appoint Saeed Jalili, a more ideological figure, to replace him at the head of the National Security Council. That would signal an Iran less likely to agree to any deal to end the war and more likely to pursue nuclear weapons. “They will substitute Larijani with a madman who prefers martyrdom and will go to the end,” says an Iranian journalist recently arrived in Britain. The regime’s tone, at least, is hardening: on March 18th Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, not only demanded an end to the bombing of Iran, but also for America and Israel to cease all attacks in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen.
Opponents of the regime may see an opening, too. Growing numbers of the security services are said to be reluctant to show up for work, for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, unrest simmers. Iranians have not rallied round the flag in the numbers they did after America’s and Israel’s previous bombing campaign, in June.
Yet Iranians largely ignored the call of Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last monarch, who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution, to protest to mark Chaharshanbe Suri, an ancient Persian festival, on March 17th. The regime still appears to function.
If it falls apart, the result may be chaos and bloodshed. A former member of the IRGC says that, should the chain of command rupture, the security forces have a plan to disperse into 30,000 five-man units. The longer the conflict drags on, the more brittle Iran’s political order becomes—and the greater the risk that the state fractures into competing centres of power, with unpredictable consequences. ■