Why killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may not mean regime change in Iran

In the aftermath of the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a joint Israel-U.S. strike, the country’s profound and deep divisions over his life and legacy were on full display.

The Iranian state television anchor who broke the news late Saturday night held back tears as he proclaimed that “the compassionate father of kindness and resolve” was dead.

Khamenei, and potentially dozens of other senior regime figures, were killed after the CIA reportedly tracked them all to a command bunker and an Israeli missile subsequently pulverized everyone, according to a report in the New York Times.

By Sunday morning, thousands of mourners had come out to public spaces, such as Enghelab Square in the capital, Tehran, in state-approved demonstrations, chanting Khamenei’s name and wailing in grief.

The 86-year-old cleric ruled Iran for 36 years and was the Middle East’s longest-serving head of state.

For some Iranians, Khamenei was revered as a courageous, charismatic figure who transformed their country into a regional power while refusing to be intimidated by the “imperialism” of the United States and Israel.

His position as one of the most senior clerics for the worldwide community of Shia Muslims also gave him reach and influence far beyond Iran’s borders.

Deeply despised

Elsewhere in Iran, however, there were scenes of celebration and cheering. In some Tehran neighbourhoods, news of Khamenei’s death touched off impromptu street celebrations that were repeatedly posted on social media.

American TV network Fox News aired a video showing euphoric protesters pulling down a Khamenei statue in the city of Galleh Dar, in Iran’s Fars province.

Khamenei was despised by many sections of Iranian society for both his social repression, especially directed at women, and for his brutality. He oversaw the killing of thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of people who opposed his rule during widespread street protests in January, as well as ordering mass arrests during earlier demonstrations in 2022.

While his assassination is unquestionably the most significant development in the opening hours of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, what happens next and who might replace him as the country’s new leader have no clear-cut answers.

“This is an event that could alter the very nature of the entire confrontation,” said Israeli analyst Danny Citrinowitz, a senior fellow with the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel and a non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council.

Other countries with sizable Shia populations, in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, could see Khamenei’s death as an attack on the entire Shiite community, leading to an expansion of the war, Citrinowitz posted on social media.

And while Khamenei was a towering figure who embodied the values of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and those of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, his death doesn’t mean the entire regime will fall.

“The Islamic Republic is not one man. The regime’s institutions — chief among them the Revolutionary Guards — are entrenched, ideological and possess clear mechanisms of continuity,” Citrinowitz wrote.

Succession planning

Already on Sunday, Iran’s vice-president said he was taking steps to ensure the country’s government would continue “without interruption” despite the killings of many senior figures.

A senior cleric, Alireza Arafi, was appointed to fill a key leadership role on Iran’s interim Leadership Council. The three-person body will take on the duties of the supreme leader until the so-called Assembly of Experts selects a new head of state.

While U.S. President Donald Trump exhorted Iranians to take advantage of Khamenei’s death “to take back their country” and said that “their hour of freedom is at hand,” with the Israeli and U.S. air attacks still ongoing, there is so far no indication Iran’s government is poised to fall.

Furthermore, analysts say history has shown that the use of air power alone to try to effect regime change — rather than combining it with boots on the ground — rarely, if ever, brings the desired results.

University of Ottawa Middle East expert Thomas Juneau cautioned that Khamenei’s killing may not become the seismic event that some hope.

“We may wish for a secular democracy to replace it swiftly, but there are two hard realities to contend with: There is no alternative, democratic or otherwise, ready to take over; and the U.S. record at engineering regime change is very poor,” Juneau wrote.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday morning, British Iranian journalist Rana Rahimpour said there has been no evidence of disloyalty to the regime from Iran’s security services nor from its powerful Revolutionary Guard.

“We don’t have any signs suggesting that the armed forces are ready to join the protesters. And as long as they have guns, it’s going to be very difficult for people to bring down the regime single-handedly.”

Confusing messaging

In the weeks leading up to Saturday morning’s attacks, the messaging from Trump over what he hopes to achieve by going to war with Iran, as well as the timelines for continuing it, has also been confusing.

Initially, Trump said Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by earlier U.S. strikes, but he later indicated he believed the threat remained. He also spoke about the need to destroy Iran’s immense arsenal of ballistic missiles — a key Israeli goal — but made very little mention of regime change.

In his Truth Social posts, Trump has suggested the U.S. attacks against Iran could continue for weeks, while also implying there may be off-ramps to end the war sooner.

Indeed, the U.S. president has repeatedly appeared to favour short and dramatic military action over longer, sustained involvement.

For weeks leading up to the U.S. military operation in early January that led to the capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, Trump spoke of regime change.

And yet once Maduro was in U.S. custody, Trump indicated he was prepared to work with Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, rather than trying to help opposition leader and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado become the country’s new leader.

At the time, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the U.S. was not looking for regime change in Venezuela but rather “a change of behaviour” by the regime.

That raises the possibility that Trump could be open to a similar repositioning or recalibration with a more moderate Iranian leader, rather than continuing to push for a complete overthrow of its government.

Israel has said its goal is to “remove the existential threat” Iran poses to the Jewish state, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said very little about what kind of political arrangement in Iran that Israel could live with.

No post-war plan?

Other observers fear that there is, in fact, no American plan beyond killing Khamenei.

“There is something worse than tyranny, and that is chaos,” said Feisal al-Istrabadi, an Iraqi lawyer and former Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations between 2004 and 2007.

Al-Istrabadi told the BBC World Service that Iraq went through chaos after despot Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. The aftermath included widespread sectarian violence, the collapse of essential services and the rise of deadly insurgency groups, such as the Islamic State.

He fears the Israeli and American obsession with killing Khamenei is shortsighted.

“I see absolutely no planning now that Khamenei is dead,” al-Istrabadi said.

“The Americans planned for almost a year for a post-Saddam Iraq and still got it wrong. This administration has not spent 24 hours planning for what comes next. And for Israel’s Netanyahu, chaos in Iran is a perfectly acceptable result.”

Sanam Vakil, head of the Middle East program at the London-based think-tank Chatham House, echoed those fears.

“The decisive phase of this conflict will not be the opening strikes, but the emergence of a political order from sustained military pressure,” she wrote on social media. “The U.S. may achieve its immediate objectives. The more consequential question is whether it is prepared for the Iranian and regional landscape that follows.”