A look at who holds the reins of power in Iran

Summary

One after another, Israel has taken out top Iranian leaders, raising the question of who is now running the country as the war continues. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening shots of the war, and Israeli strikes have also killed Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, according to the Associated Press. With multiple senior figures removed, the power structure in Iran—what is known, what is not, and how different institutions can keep operating—has come into sharper focus.

In Iran’s system, the supreme leader is described as the ultimate authority, sitting at the apex of power since the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 after the revolution that overthrew the shah. After Khamenei was killed, his son, 56-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei, was quickly named as his replacement, the AP reported. The younger cleric is described as secretive and not seen in public since the airstrike killed his 86-year-old father, and he has been characterized as never having been elected or appointed to a government position despite being considered a contender for the post.

The AP report also said Mojtaba Khamenei has close ties to Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and that his views are believed to be even more hard-line than those of his father. The younger Khamenei is described as officially in charge of Iran’s armed forces, with decisions involving Iran’s nuclear program resting with him. But the article posed a central uncertainty: whether he is truly running Iran in practice, given the way authority is shared and exercised across multiple security and political institutions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly cast doubt on the situation, saying, “I’m not sure who’s running Iran right now.” Netanyahu added that Mojtaba Khamenei “has not shown his face” and said: “Have you seen him? We haven’t, and we can’t vouch for what exactly is happening there.” The AP report also said Mojtaba Khamenei’s wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, was killed in the Israeli strike that killed his father, and that U.S. and Israeli officials have suggested he was wounded in the same attack.

Other analysts said eliminating so many top leaders could alter Iran’s theocracy, while also warning that the effects might not be immediate. Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East security at the United Kingdom-based Royal United Services Institute, said the loss of decision-makers spanning politics, intelligence, internal security and the army would have “transformative consequences.” She said the “fixation on the terminology of ‘regime collapse’” could obscure the fact that “the regime is already changing,” but that “the full impact of the war on the country could take time to emerge,” adding that “We need to be prepared for change that may take years, not weeks or months.”

The AP report said that for many analysts, real power now rests with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, was quoted as saying, “The Revolutionary Guard is the state now.” Before the war, Vaez said civilian leadership was “subservient entirely” to the supreme leader, while the Guard was already described as the second-most powerful force. With the elder Khamenei gone and his son not enjoying the same authority as his father, Vaez said, “it is really the Revolutionary Guards who are running the country.”

The Revolutionary Guard emerged from Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution as a force intended to protect the Shiite cleric-overseen government, the AP report said, later becoming enshrined in Iran’s constitution and operating parallel to the regular armed forces. The report also described how the Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force supported what Iran calls its “Axis of Resistance” against Israel and the United States, including backing for Syria’s former President Bashar Assad, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and other armed groups across the region.

The AP report also highlighted the possibility of military independence from centralized control. It said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested early in the war that Iran’s military units were acting independently from central government control. In remarks aired on Al Jazeera on March 1, Araghchi said: “Our … military units are now in fact independent and somehow isolated and they are acting based on instructions — you know, general instructions — given to them in advance,” according to the AP. Araghchi also addressed Tehran’s actions elsewhere in the Gulf, telling Al Jazeera: “What happened in Oman was not our choice,” and “We have already told our … army, armed forces to be careful about the targets that they choose.”

In explaining why removing senior figures may not automatically produce paralysis, Vaez said Iran is a state with more than one decision layer. He described what he said was a mistake by the United States and Israel: believing rhetoric that Iran is akin to a terrorist organization, and concluding that decapitating the regime or removing one or two political elites would result in paralysis and collapse. Vaez was quoted saying: “Whereas this is a state, … it has multiple layers of leadership.” He added that even if all top generals were eliminated, others lower down could pick up, and said that the expectation the regime would “implode by removing a few dozen senior leaders” was “nothing but an illusion.”