Al Jazeera:

By Mohammad Mansour

The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air attacks has caused one of the most significant blows to the country’s leadership since the 1979 Islamic revolution, triggering protests by his supporters.

Khamenei assumed Iran’s supreme leadership in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the Islamic revolution against the pro-United States Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said seeking revenge for the killing of Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials is the country’s “duty and legitimate right”.

President Donald Trump has framed the operation as a “liberation” moment, predicting that the removal of the “head” will lead to the swift collapse of the body. However, in Iran, the reality suggests a far more complex situation.

Interviews with insiders, military experts and political sociologists suggest that the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership may not go the way the West envisions. Instead, it risks birthing a “garrison state” – a paranoid, militarised system fighting for its existence with no political red lines left to cross.

The limits of ‘decapitation’
The central premise of the US operation is that Iran is too brittle to survive the death of its supreme leader. In a phone interview with CBS News, Trump claimed he “knows exactly” who is calling the shots in Tehran, adding that “there are some good candidates” to replace the supreme leader. He did not elaborate on his claims.

However, military analysts warn against the assumption that air strikes alone can trigger “regime change”. Michael Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence, told Al Jazeera Arabic that without “boots on the ground” or a fully armed organic uprising, the state’s deep security apparatus can survive simply by maintaining cohesion.

“You cannot facilitate regime change through air strikes alone,” Mulroy said. “If anyone is left alive to speak, the regime is still there.”

This resilience is rooted in Iran’s dual military structure. The government is protected not just by a regular army (Artesh), but also by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a powerful parallel military force constitutionally tasked with protecting the velayat-e faqih system – the principle of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.

Supporting them is the Basij, a vast paramilitary volunteer militia embedded in every neighbourhood, specifically trained to crush internal dissent and mobilise ideological loyalists.

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