Israel’s killing of Ali Larijani, the powerful secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security, does not deal a fatal blow to Iran’s leadership, the country’s foreign minister said.
In an interview with Al Jazeera that aired after Tehran confirmed Larijani’s killing early Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragushi said the United States and Israel had not yet realized that the Iranian government was not dependent on a single individual.
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“I don’t know why Americans and Israelis still don’t understand this point. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a strong political structure with established political, economic and social institutions,” Araghchi said.
“The presence or absence of a single individual does not affect this structure,” he said.
“Of course, individuals have influence and each plays their role. Some are better, some are worse, some are less so. But the important thing is that Iran’s political system is a very solid structure.”
Araghchi pointed to the assassination of the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of a US-Israeli airstrike on February 28, and said that despite the huge national losses, “the regime continued.”
“We have no person more important than the leader himself, and even the leader was martyred, but the system continued to function and quickly provided a replacement,” the foreign minister said.
“If someone else were martyred, it would be the same,” he added.
“Even if the foreign minister dies a martyr, someone else will eventually take the post.”
Monday night’s attack, which killed Ali Khamenei and Larijani, 67, a confidant of his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei, marks the most senior figure in Tehran’s leadership since the war-opening airstrike 19 days ago.
Iranian state media confirmed on Tuesday that Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij Force, a paramilitary force within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was also killed in an attack by “American Zionist enemies.”
For the past six years, Soleimani, commander of the Basij, the country’s most powerful internal security force, has reportedly emerged as a key leader in the fightback against the US-Israeli war against Iran.
Al Jazeera senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said Israel has long engaged in assassinations of political opponents, but this is not normal practice in wars.
“War doesn’t start by killing political leaders, including elected leaders. That assassination plot is gangsterism, it’s terrorism, and it’s not the norm in war.”
Bishara said that while “the Iranian regime is strong and the killing of a single leader will not lead to its collapse,” such targeted killings have an impact in that “quantitative change causes qualitative change.”
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Aragushi reiterated that the growing conflict in the Gulf region and beyond was not the Iranian government’s choice, and that ultimately the United States must take responsibility.
“Let me repeat: this war is not our war,” the minister said.
“We did not start it. The United States started it and is responsible for all the human and economic consequences of this war, whether in Iran, in the region or around the world.”
“The United States must take responsibility,” he added.
