As Israel removes one Iranian leader after another, it remains to be seen if the elimination of key decision-makers will bring regime change any closer.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said the US and Israel do not understand that the Islamic Republic is a robust political system and does not depend on any single individual.
The death of senior officials will not disrupt governance and the state will continue to function, he told Al Jazeera on Wednesday, following Israel’s assassination of Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s national security council.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has a strong political structure with established political, economic and social institutions,” he said. “The presence or absence of a single individual does not affect this structure. Even the leader was martyred. Yet the system continued to work and immediately provided a replacement.”
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Israel has killed more than half of Iran’s senior leadership in less than three weeks of fighting. Even as Larijani was being buried in Tehran, news came in of another Israeli assassination – Iran’s intelligence minister Esmail Khatib.
Will the relatively inexperienced officials who have replaced the slain leaders be able to function under the most difficult circumstances, as the US and Israel continue their relentless air strikes across the country? The most prominent appointment, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, hasn’t been seen in public since he was chosen to replace his father.
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As far as Israel is concerned, the entire Iranian leadership are legitimate targets and will be hit if, and when, an operational window opens. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday that, together with prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, he has “authorised the Israel Defence Forces to assassinate any senior Iranian official . . . without the need for additional approval.”
For Araghchi, it was business as usual. “We have a president, we have a foreign minister, we have the leader. All the pillars of the system are in their proper place,” he said.
Israel, of course, has a long history of targeted killings. But, both Hamas and Hizbullah survived after numerous leaders were killed. Israel has sometimes discovered that the replacements were more capable than the leaders who were eliminated.
In the case of Iran, it is possible that Larijani’s killing will undermine the stability of the regime and deepen rifts within the leadership. However, it could also strengthen the grip of the Republican Guards on power – which was already boosted by Mojtaba’s appointment – at the expense of more practical elements within the regime. This could affect the chances of ending the fighting with some kind of agreement, particularly pertaining to the Iranian nuclear programme.
