For a week Iran had functioned surprisingly smoothly under American and Israeli bombardment. Preparations ordered by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, before his assassination on 28 February, proceeded as planned. The first wave of air strikes killed fewer among Iran’s leadership than was first reported. Almost all the deputy commanders and key regime figures survived, including the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and Ali Larijani, the secretary of the National Security Council.
Early on 9 March (in Iran) came the most defiant sign yet that the regime is still intact, with the naming of Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali, as the country’s new supreme leader. Unlike his father, who had the last word, Mojtaba is likely to be seen as a figurehead. His succession shows that control of the country lies with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Coup (IRGC), the defenders of the Islamic Republic.
That will frustrate reformers, who may have hoped for one of their own. Many clerics will be disappointed, too. Dynastic succession in what purports to be a theocracy will be deeply unpopular with those who still believe in the ideals of a revolution that overthrew a hereditary monarchy.
Perhaps such disputes help explain why the Assembly of Experts took so long to elect Mojtaba. In addition, the committee, made up of 88 senior clerics, struggled to meet after Israeli strikes demolished its office in the holy city of Qom. Indeed, Mojtaba is likely to remain hiding deep underground, so as to protect himself from assassination—a fate Israel has vowed to visit on each successor. He has not been seen since the first strikes over a week ago, and members of his close family are known to have died, leading to speculation about his own health.
Aged 56, Mojtaba has always been a recluse. Though he ran the beyt—the 4,000-man court that oversaw his father’s hold on the state—almost no footage of him exists. Iranians who have met him describe him as modest and shy, though he managed an economic empire worth billions of dollars. He would drive to his seminary in a battered Paykan, Iran’s version of the old Hillman Hunter.
Reformers see Mojtaba as a repressive figure. His closest political ally is Hossein Taeb, a cleric who once ran the feared intelligence arm of the IRGC. Together they hounded reformists, backed—and it is said rigged—the election of a hardline president in 2009, and helped oversee Iran’s transformation from a hybrid theocracy-cum-democracy into a security state that crushed dissent.
Clerics also have reason to complain. Mojtaba lacks the clerical and political qualifications that the constitution requires of a supreme leader. He has never held formal office. Nor has he published the scholarly treatise required of a mujtahid, a recognised source of religious authority—let alone attained the rank of grand ayatollah.
The country he has inherited is poised between endurance and collapse. The depth, severity and accuracy of Iran’s missile arsenal have surprised officials in Washington and Tel Aviv. Such is the fear of retaliation that, despite coming under repeated attack, the Gulf Arab states have so far refrained from joining the assault.
Instead, Iran-watchers speak of the regime’s renewed cohesion and resolve, which had both ebbed in the twilight of the elder Khamenei’s reign. There are few reports of defections. The generals commanding the IRGC are prosecuting the war without civilian oversight. The military men are seemingly supplanting the clerics, who the constitution says should be running the country. “Khamenei’s death unshackled them,” warns an Iranian businessman in exile. “They’re more militant, nationalistic and emboldened.”
That bears out external assessments, such as a Gulf intelligence report on 5 March, which noted that, “contrary to initial intelligence estimates, large segments of the Iranian military leadership remain operational.” And it echoes an American intelligence report prepared shortly before the war, which had concluded an attack on Iran would be unlikely to dislodge the regime.
And yet, nine days into the fighting, Iran’s resilience is being tested. Western forces are shifting from Phase I—America’s and Israel’s destruction of Iran’s military capacity—to Phase II—the targeting of governing institutions and vital infrastructure. The strike against the supreme leader’s office, along with his 5,000-square-metre (or 54,000-square-foot) bunker in downtown Tehran, has left a hole in the machinery of government.
Basic services are at risk. For now, Iranians say that groceries are still available in the capital. Dustmen sweep its streets at dawn as explosions echo around them. But increasingly, they say, Tehran resembles Gaza after Israel’s attacks. The strike on oil facilities on 8 March first lit up the night and then, after daybreak, cast much of Tehran into darkness—even as the city’s ancient drainage channels flowed like rivers of fire, burning oil and setting shops and homes alight. Rain poured a viscous black.
The economy is reeling. The destruction of ports and the closure of border crossings hamper imports; attacks on factories are crippling domestic production. Some officials worry that food stocks may run short ahead of the festival marking the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, and Nowruz, the Persian new year, on 20 March.
Infrastructure is also under strain. A strike on a desalination plant in the south threatens water supplies, already badly strained before the war. Fuel is rationed. If attacks reach the oil and gas fields—or the country’s only major terminal on Kharg Island—gas supplies vital for electricity generation and cooking could be severed.
The widespread contempt which many Iranians had for their rulers is giving way to anguish at the destruction of the state itself. But without the means to resist, a surge of national sentiment alone cannot defend the state.
In addition, Mojtaba could struggle to stamp his authority as the supreme leader. Central control had been intentionally devolved by his father as part of his preparations for war. Before his death, local commanders were given sets of targets and were instructed to keep fighting in the event of the loss of central authority, say Iran-watchers. “We’ve heard they’ve divided Iran into 31 units—each with absolute command and authority to take all decisions without reference to a ministry or central command,” says a Kurdish official monitoring Iran in Erbil, the Kurds’ administrative capital in Iraq. The regime also split the Basij, the huge paramilitary force it uses to suppress dissent, into small cells of five and distributed hundreds of thousands of weapons.
Moreover, the heads of the regime’s various branches, scattered in bunkers—believed to be deep beneath the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, far from Tehran—are struggling to coordinate their message. Half an hour after Mr Pezeshkian apologised for missile strikes on the country’s neighbours, the IRGC fired fresh drones at Arab states across the Gulf.
This decentralisation brings risks. Commanders who already run rival smuggling networks could choose to become warlords. And Iran’s neighbours might nibble at the state’s weakened edges.
The United Arab Emirates has long coveted three small but strategic islands near the Strait of Hormuz. Türkiye might intervene to protect Iran’s Turkish-speaking Azeris, as it did for the far smaller number of Turkomans in Iraq and Syria. Fighters from Islamic State Khorasan Province, an offshoot of the group that once established a “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, might advance from bases in Afghanistan. Most ominously, Kurdish fighters based in Iraqi Kurdistan could cross the frontier and seize Kurdish towns.
For Israel, disabling Iran’s military might is worth the risk of chaos and state collapse. What America wants is less clear. Donald Trump may find that, as in Iraq, the creation of a failed state will haunt the Middle East for years, undermining stability and American power there.
