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The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air attacks has caused one of the most significant blows to the country’s leadership since the 1979 Islamic revolution, triggering protests by his supporters.

Khamenei assumed Iran’s supreme leadership in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the Islamic revolution against the pro-United States Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said seeking revenge for the killing of Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials is the country’s “duty and legitimate right”.

President Donald Trump has framed the operation as a “liberation” moment, predicting that the removal of the “head” will lead to the swift collapse of the body. However, in Iran, the reality suggests a far more complex situation.

Interviews with insiders, military experts and political sociologists suggest that the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership may not go the way the West envisions. Instead, it risks birthing a “garrison state” – a paranoid, militarised system fighting for its existence with no political red lines left to cross.

The limits of ‘decapitation’

The central premise of the US operation is that Iran is too brittle to survive the death of its supreme leader. In a phone interview with CBS News, Trump claimed he “knows exactly” who is calling the shots in Tehran, adding that “there are some good candidates” to replace the supreme leader. He did not elaborate on his claims.

However, military analysts warn against the assumption that air strikes alone can trigger “regime change”. Michael Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence, told Al Jazeera Arabic that without “boots on the ground” or a fully armed organic uprising, the state’s deep security apparatus can survive simply by maintaining cohesion.

“You cannot facilitate regime change through air strikes alone,” Mulroy said. “If anyone is left alive to speak, the regime is still there.”

This resilience is rooted in Iran’s dual military structure. The government is protected not just by a regular army (Artesh), but also by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a powerful parallel military force constitutionally tasked with protecting the velayat-e faqih system – the principle of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.

Supporting them is the Basij, a vast paramilitary volunteer militia embedded in every neighbourhood, specifically trained to crush internal dissent and mobilise ideological loyalists.

That cohesion is already being tested.

Hossein Royvaran, a political analyst based in Tehran, confirmed that the strikes wiped out the country’s top security tier, including Khamenei’s adviser and secretary of the newly-formed Supreme Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani.

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said the leadership transition will begin on Sunday.

“An interim leadership council will soon be formed. The president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist from the Guardian Council will assume responsibility until the election of the next leader,” said Larijani.

“This council will be established as soon as possible. We are working to form it as early as today,” he said in an interview broadcast by state TV.

The rapid formation of an interim leadership council – comprising the president, judiciary chief, and a Guardian Council religious leader – indicates that the system’s “survival protocols” have been activated.

According to Royvaran, the system is designed to be “institutional, not personal”, capable of functioning on “autopilot” even when the political leadership is severed.

But a Tehran-based analyst said direction of Iran is still unclear as officials try to ‘project stability’.

“Officials here are trying to project stability, emphasising that the situation is under control and that state institutions are functioning effectively,” Abas Aslani, senior research fellow at the Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, said.

“Today, [the US-Israeli] air strikes targeted security and military infrastructure in the capital [Tehran] and other cities. There are expectations that such strikes could continue – and possibly intensify – in the coming hours or days,” he told Al Jazeera.

“That prospect of escalation is not something many ordinary Iranians welcome. At the same time, Iranian officials are issuing strong warnings, suggesting they could respond with capabilities that have not previously been used against Israel or the United States.”

From theocracy to nationalist survival

Perhaps the most significant shift in the immediate aftermath is Iran’s pivot from religious legitimacy to survivalist nationalism.

Aware that the death of the supreme leader might sever the spiritual bond with parts of the population, surviving officials are reframing the war not as a defence of the clergy, but as a defence of Iran’s territorial integrity.

Larijani, a conservative heavyweight and key figure in the transition, issued a stark warning that Israel’s ultimate goal is the “partition” of Iran. By raising the spectre of Iran being broken into ethnic statelets, the leadership aims to rally secular Iranians and the opposition against a common external enemy.

This strategy complicates the US hope for a popular uprising.

Saleh al-Mutairi, a political sociologist, notes that the government’s declaration of 40 days of mourning creates a “funeral trap” for the opposition. The streets will likely be filled with millions of mourners, creating a human shield for the government and making it logistically and morally difficult for antigovernment protests to gain momentum in the short term.

The end of ‘strategic patience’

If Iran survives the initial shock, the nation that emerges will likely be fundamentally different: less calculated and probably more violent.

For years, Khamenei championed a doctrine of “strategic patience”, often absorbing blows to avoid all-out war.

Hassan Ahmadian, a professor at the University of Tehran, says the era died with the supreme leader.

“Iran learned a hard lesson from the June 2025 war: Restraint is interpreted as weakness,” Ahmadian told Al Jazeera Arabic. The new calculus in Tehran is likely to be a “scorched earth” policy.

“The decision has been made. If attacked, Iran will burn everything,” Ahmadian added, suggesting that the response will be broader and more painful than anything seen in previous escalations.”

This risks a scenario where field commanders, freed from the political caution of the clerical leadership, lash out with greater ferocity. The assassination has humiliated the security establishment, exposing what Liqaa Maki, a senior researcher at Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, calls a catastrophic intelligence failure.

“The believer is not bitten from the same hole twice, yet Iran has been bitten twice,” Maki said, referring to the pattern of US strikes. This “total exposure” is likely to drive the surviving leadership underground, turning Iran into a hyper-security state that views any internal dissent as foreign collaboration, he said.

While the “head” of Iran has been removed, the “body” – armed with one of the largest missile arsenals in the Middle East – remains, Maki said.

A strange quirk at San Quentin state prison is that most of those incarcerated behind its towering walls are unable to see the San Francisco Bay that literally laps at the shore a few yards away.

That changed recently with the completion of new buildings — holding among other accouterments a self-serve kitchen, a library, a cafe and a film studio — and third-floor classrooms that look out over that beautiful blue expanse, long a symbol of freedom and possibility.

In the new San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, along with learning job skills and earning degrees, incarcerated men can do their own laundry, make their own meals, and interact with guards as mentors and colleagues of sorts, once a taboo kind of relationship in the us-and-them world of incarceration.

“You want to clothes wash? You wash them,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom, debuting the new facilities, including laundry machines, for reporters last week. “You want to get something to eat. You can do it, whenever.”

“All of a sudden, it’s like you’re starting to make decisions for yourself,” he said. “It’s called life.”

Listen closely, and one can almost hear President Trump’s brain exploding with glee and outrage as his favorite Democratic foil seemingly coddles criminals. A cafe? C’mon. Bring on the midterms!

March 2024 of the East Block of San Quentin’s former death row.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

But what Newsom has done inside California’s most notorious prison, once home to the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere, is nothing short of a remarkable shift of thinking, culture and implementation around what it means to take away someone’s freedom — and eventually give it back. Adapted from European models, it’s a vision of incarceration that is meant to deal with the reality that 95% of people who go to prison are eventually released. That’s more than 30,000 people each year in California alone.

“What kind of neighbors do you want them to be?” Newsom asked. “Are they coming back broken? Are they coming back better? Are they coming back more enlivened, more capable? Are they coming back into prison over and over?”

When it comes to reforming criminals, “success looks like more and more people gravitating to their own journey, their own personal reform,” Newsom said, sounding more like a lifestyle influencer than a presidential contender. “It’s not forced on you, because then it’s fake, man. If it’s coerced, I don’t buy it.”

Of course, coming back better should be the goal — because better people commit fewer crimes, and that benefits us all. But coming back over and over has become the norm.

Traditional incarceration, a lock-’em-up and watch-them-suffer approach, has dramatically failed not only our communities and public safety writ large, but also inmates and even those who guard them.

Incarcerated people come out of prison too often in California (and across the country) with addictions and emotional troubles still firmly in place, and no job or educational skills to help them muddle through a crime-free life. That means they often commit more crimes, create more victims and cycle back into this failed, expensive, tough-on-crime system.

Still, it’s a favorite trope of Trump, and the justification for both his immigration roundups and his deployment of National Guard troops in Democratic cities, that policies such as Newsom’s are weak on crime and have led to the decline of American society.

This narrative of fear and grievance goes back decades, recycled every election by the so-called law-and-order party because it’s effective — voters crave safety, especially in a chaotic world. And locking people up seems safe, at least until we let them go again.

But, as Chance Andes, the warden of San Quentin, pointed out last week, “Humanity is safety,” and treating incarcerated people like, well, people, actually makes them want to behave better.

Here’s where the tough-on-crime folks will begin composing their angry emails. Why are we paying for killers to have a view? Why should I care if a rapist has a good book to read? Our budget is bleeding red, why are tax dollars being used for prison lattes? (To be fair, I do not know whether they actually have lattes.)

But consider this: The prison guards back Newsom.

“Done right, it improves working conditions for our officers and strengthens public safety,” said Steve Adney, executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., the union that represents guards, of the California model, as Newsom calls his vision.

Faced with high rates of suicide and other ills such as addiction, corrections officers have long been concerned about the stress and violence of their jobs. A few years ago, some union members traveled to Norway to see prisons there. I tagged along.

A correctional officer at Halden prison in Norway checks out the ice cream freezer in the grocery store inside the facility.

(Javad Parsa/For The Times)

The American officers were shocked to see Norwegian prisoners access kitchen knives and power tools, but even more shocked that the guards had built relationships with these criminals that allowed them to do their jobs with far less fear.

Rather than jailers, these corrections officers were more like social workers or guides to a better way of living. Of course, the corrections officers aren’t dumb. That only works with vetted inmates, such as those at San Quentin, who have proved they want to change.

But when you have officers and incarcerated people who are able to coexist with respect and maybe a dash of kindness, you get a different outcome for both sides.

“If we are capable of building this at San Quentin, then we are capable of making the workplace safe for every officer who walks in the gates,” said CCPOA President Neil Flood, a startling statement in favor of radical reform from a law enforcement officer.

But in a moment when most Democrats with ambitions for national office (or even an eye on replacing Newsom) are backing away from criminal justice reform, it would be naive to think the California model won’t be used to bludgeon Newsom in a presidential race, and provide further fuel to the dumpster-fire narrative about the state.

Soon — before the midterms — many expect Congress to move forward on Trump’s expressed desire for a crime bill that would empower police with even greater immunity for wrongdoing, create longer sentences for crimes including those involving drugs and further erode criminal justice reform in the name of public safety.

Trump is going hard in the opposite direction, toward more punishment, always the easier and more understandable route for voters fed up with crime (even though crime rates have been declining since President Biden was in office).

The California model is “a political liability in this environment,” said Tinisch Hollins, a victims advocate who worked on the San Quentin transition and heads Californians for Safety and Justice.

But she retains faith that “the majority of people don’t believe that shoving everyone into prison is how we resolve the problem.”

Newsom deserves credit for standing by that position, when simply backing away and dropping the California model would have been the simpler and safer route — it’s complicated and messy and oh-so-easy to make it sound dumb.

I refer you back to the cafe. If construction had been cut at San Quentin, the budget cited as the reason, no one would have noticed and few would have complained.

Instead, sounding a bit like Trump, Newsom said he “threatened the hell out of them if they didn’t get it done before I was gone.”

“This is not left or right,” he said. “This is just being smart and pragmatic and you know, I just … I believe people are not the worst thing they’ve done.”

Politically at least, San Quentin is a legacy for Newsom now, the best or worst thing he’s done on crime, depending on your personal views of second chances.

But it is undeniably a vision of public safety starkly at odds with Trump, one Newsom will carry into his next political fight — where it is certain to cause him some pain.

After the January return of Douglas Luiz – signed from Manchester City in 2019 – Villa are just one away, a left-back, from being able to field a team of Smith players.

Add Lucas Digne, who joined under Steven Gerrard, and it will be a side without the initial input of Unai Emery, even if the Spaniard has re-signed Luiz and Ross Barkley.

Smith was sacked in November 2021 after three years in charge but his influence remains.

In January 2019 he signed Tyrone Mings on loan from Bournemouth, the longest serving player of his reign, who played his 200th game for Villa in the win over Brighton.

Ezri Konsa and Luiz arrived in the summer, after Villa were promoted to the Premier League, while Matty Cash, Emi Martinez, Lamare Bogarde, Barkley, Leon Bailey, Emi Buendia and Ollie Watkins also joined under the former Brentford boss.

The backbone of the squad are players – Mings, Konsa, Watkins, Cash and John McGinn – signed from a lower level [the Championship and Scottish Premiership] with a risk element attached.

McGinn signed for £3.5m from Hibernian under Steve Bruce while Konsa – now an England international – joined from Brentford for £12m and Cash cost £16m from Nottingham Forest.

Emery has lifted the squad to unexpected levels but unless they unearth a gem, Villa cannot replace Konsa for £12m in the current market and certainly not for the relatively low fees previously spent.

There lies the biggest problem, succession planning with limited funds.

The average age of Villa’s starting XI is 28 years and 84 days – the second oldest in the Premier League – and there is internal recognition it needs to be dealt with.

Brazilian winger Alysson, 19, joined from Gremio for £10m last month with 17-year-old Brian Madjo arriving from Metz for a similar fee to start that process.

Villa signed them earlier than they would have liked but moved to get the pair for a smaller fee, reducing the risk.

Neither are expected to make an immediate impact, although Alysson made his debut in midweek, but the January window was viewed as striking a balance – addressing the age issue and solving the first-team problems.

Striker Tammy Abraham arrived to back up Watkins while Luiz returned on loan from Juventus out of necessity following Boubacar Kamara’s season-ending knee injury.

With Villa committed to spending £18.25m on Abraham they had no money left to cover Kamara, so Luiz was ideal.

He was cheap, available, with his loan at Nottingham Forest being cancelled, and knew what Emery demands.