Khamenei’s personalized rule has left the Islamic Republic unprepared for a sudden leaderless crisis; after mass killing and war shocks, the system panics, obsessed with his survival and succession.
The nationwide uprising in early January 2026 was a major shock for the Islamic Republic—another blow to a body already battered by the 12-day war in June 2025 and still behaving like a patient in intensive care. Before furious, exhausted people poured into the streets, the state expected unrest, but not on the scale that erupted. It imagined something closer to November 2019, or perhaps a climate resembling the 2022 uprising.
But the protests that broke out in January 2026 looked different: they spread so widely that Khamenei and the security leadership concluded that only an order for blind mass killing could pull the system back from the brink of rapid collapse. The large-scale killing campaign the Islamic Republic unleashed has, in the short term, achieved its immediate aim: preventing an overnight fall. You can see it in the fear stamped onto the cities—and in the killers’ staged displays of power over mourners on state television and in the main streets. But the story is not over. The system has merely bought time.
Mass killing rarely brings a regime “back to normal”
Using slaughter as a tool of survival is a dangerous tactic. Very few political systems manage to return to anything like “normal life” after killing their own people. China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre may be one of the rare cases where a state killed on a massive scale and still managed, over time, to contain the consequences.
Other examples point in the opposite direction: the killing in Daraa in Syria, the killing in Benghazi in Libya, the Timisoara killings in Romania, the repression of opponents under Pinochet, and Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s and 1980s. They all underline a grim pattern: mass killing may buy a government time, but it almost always destroys legitimacy, produces permanent crisis, and ends the possibility of “normal life” for the political order itself.
The Islamic Republic’s situation is even more complicated. Long before the killings of January 2026, it had already abandoned any “normal” political life. What happened in recent weeks has only intensified that condition.
After a massacre, regimes typically face a long, costly agenda: reorganizing the coercive apparatus, crushing and fragmenting opponents, studying the sparks that produced the uprising, and blocking pathways to another eruption through surveillance and social engineering.
And here lies a contradiction: a regime that failed to anticipate a massive uprising—and failed to manage repression through lower-cost tactics—does not suddenly become wise and capable after ordering blind slaughter. That is why political systems entering a post-massacre phase so often slide into a long period of crisis-soaked survival.
From managing the massacre to fearing an assassination
But Khamenei and the ruling system face another, immediate pressure: the failure of the Islamic Republic’s security strategies in recent years has also made its external enemies impatient for its end.
Managing mass killing and the society that follows is already a vast, painful project. Yet when Donald Trump, the U.S. president, signals eagerness to strike the core of the Islamic Republic—and appears ready to target Ali Khamenei—priorities shift.
When the president of a country whose streets are still stained with protesters’ blood becomes consumed with the Supreme Leader’s safety, a message is sent: managing the massacre is now priority number two; saving the Leader’s life comes first.
One emergency after another. Khamenei ordered mass killing to stop the human flood in the cities so the system could at least continue in a kind of bare, minimal survival. And now the U.S. president may be tempted to kill him.
This is not an attempt to mock Khamenei. It is a description of the situation without exaggeration. Look at Masoud Pezeshkian’s tweet on Sunday, January 18, 2026: “An assault on the Leader of the Revolution is equal to an all-out war with the people of Iran.”
Put that next to Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf’s speech the next day, January 19, 2026, in which he portrayed Khamenei not only as leader, but as the “life” of the Iranian nation, and ended by chanting: “The blood in our veins is a gift to our Leader.”
Isn’t this strange—unnatural? Two heads of state branches have dropped everything and are fixated on the possibility that a bullet might be aimed at Ali Khamenei. Governments massacre to stay in power—not to massacre and then find themselves in a worse position than before.
While the Islamic Republic should be implementing its post-crime arrangements—reorganizing itself to withstand future waves of domestic fury—it is consumed by a larger external threat: one that targets the very top of the system.
A system built around one man
So why is the Islamic Republic facing such chaos in executing its “survival arrangements”?
Because the Islamic Republic as we know it is the product of Ali Khamenei’s design. He shaped its architecture, arranged its components, removed some figures and elevated others, set strategies—and drove this bus to the station of the January 2026 massacre. The structure he built connects nearly every part of the system to him through one, or at most two, intermediaries. Formally, there is separation of powers. In practice, every power-holder has power by his permission—and by his gesture can be dismissed, confined, or eliminated.
A political order that depends on one individual is inherently fragile. Multiple power centers—and not concentrating everything in one person—usually increases a system’s ability to absorb shocks. If one part breaks, the whole machine does not freeze.
But in “Khamenei’s Islamic Republic,” what has been stripped away is precisely what a system needs to endure. Even before the war and the massacre—when the biggest risk was the succession crisis—people inside the system said: “the Leader will manage succession himself.” Meaning: Khamenei will even manage his own death and decide who sits in his chair. Why? Because no one else truly holds power.
That was the Islamic Republic before the 12-day war in June 2025 and the massacre in January 2026. After those months, the question of Khamenei’s death no longer belongs to him. In a normal scenario—death by illness, no acute crisis—a dictator can try to stage-manage succession. But in a permanent emergency, succession planning turns into panic: even routine military signals—changes in flight patterns, the sudden emptying of a base, the movement of a carrier—are interpreted as warnings that an external operation is underway and that Khamenei could be targeted at any moment.
That is why everyone—even senior officials—talks about Khamenei dying, or thinks about it. Not his natural death, but when, where, and how he might be killed. A system that has moved by the will of one man is terrified that he could vanish in a moment.
If Khamenei is killed, what will the system do?
A leadership class that cannot lead without him
The heads of the branches function less like autonomous officials and more like the Supreme Leader’s managers. They are not positioned to execute an independent “survival strategy” for the political system. They neither have the capacity nor know what to do. Their eyes remain fixed on the Leader’s mouth.
Is that an exaggeration? Look at Pezeshkian’s government—its positions during and after the protests, its performance, its weakness. The state has reached a point where the presence or absence of a president and cabinet barely changes anything. What does it matter whether there is an oil minister when oil is sold through smuggling networks run by the Supreme Leader’s trusted men—stage-managed by the IRGC and its intelligence apparatus? Khamenei decides where the money goes. The oil minister—who should be central in any normal state—has little control over production, sales, or distribution.
We do not know what Khamenei’s ultimate fate will be. And, in a sense, it does not matter. He has done everything he could. The result is in front of us. The question is what becomes of “Khamenei’s Islamic Republic” without Khamenei—whether that absence comes through an enemy’s bullet, or through death in old age.
One thing is clear: the Islamic Republic as we know it is not prepared to survive in a world without Khamenei.
