Iran has not confirmed it, but Israel says it killed senior security chief Ali Larijani in an overnight air strike. If that turns out to be true, it would strip the Islamic Republic of one of its most capable and strategically important figures at one of the most dangerous moments in its modern history.
Larijani wasn’t a military commander in the traditional sense, but his influence ran far deeper than his title suggested. As secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, he sat at the centre of Iran’s most consequential decisions — on war, on diplomacy, on national security. His voice carried particular weight when it came to managing Iran’s confrontation with the United States and Israel. After Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the first round of US-Israeli strikes on 28 February, it was Larijani who struck a defiant public tone, signalling that Iran was prepared to fight a long war.
Within Iran, he was often described as a pragmatist — not a moderate by any means, but someone who combined ideological commitment with a hard-headed, technocratic approach to strategy. He was deeply sceptical of the West, yet he was also the man who helped negotiate Iran’s long-term cooperation agreement with China. He favoured calculated moves over empty rhetoric, which made him genuinely useful to the system in a way that pure hardliners rarely are.
At the time of his reported death, he was managing three simultaneous crises. The first was the war itself, which he believed Iran should prepare to fight for the long haul, expanding the conflict across the region and maintaining the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The second was a wave of domestic unrest that had started over economic grievances and grown into something far more threatening — widespread protests aimed at toppling the Islamic Republic, met with a crackdown that has already killed thousands. The third was Iran’s nuclear programme and the collapsed indirect negotiations with Washington, both disrupted by the ongoing strikes.
All three of those crises now fall to whoever comes next — an unnamed successor stepping into an extraordinarily fragile situation, and one who will almost certainly face the same risk of being targeted that Larijani himself faced.
That threat alone is likely to push power further toward the military. President Masoud Pezeshkian has already indicated that armed forces units have been given broad authority to act if senior leadership is incapacitated — which could mean faster decisions, but with less coordination and less strategic coherence at the top.
There are also signs of strain around succession more broadly. Iran has been slow to make public announcements and has kept certain key figures, including new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, largely out of public view. Whether that reflects genuine security concerns or internal disarray — or both — is difficult to say from the outside.
What is clearer is the direction things are heading. In the short term, the likely result is a harder military posture in the war and harsher repression of dissent at home. Over a longer stretch, a leadership structure that keeps losing senior figures will find it increasingly difficult to function — particularly in a country of more than 90 million people facing war, economic pressure and internal revolt at the same time.
Larijani’s death, if confirmed, wouldn’t just be the removal of one official. It would add another fracture to a leadership already under enormous strain — and deepen a crisis that could shape both the outcome of the war and the long-term survival of the Iranian state.
