Edmund Blair

What we understand from sources is that there was a meeting which involved the Supreme Leader and a couple of senior advisers.

And it seems that that meeting, or at least moments after that meeting, or a moment when they had located Khamenei and made a strike on Khamenei, was the start gun.

for the wave of strikes that followed.

In a sense, it would look like Khamenei was the primary target.

Striking him was a primary goal.

We did effectively get that message from both Prime Minister Netanyahu and from President Trump.

On one level, it's fairly straightforward.

Iran has a constitution under the system of clerical rule.

And the idea is, and this has already taken place, they've appointed a three-person council.

That three-person, effectively a three-man council, involves the president, a member of something called the guardian council, and it involves the head of the judiciary.

And then they hold power for about three months.

And then another body called the Assembly of Experts, which is a grouping of senior clerics,

come together and decide who will be the next supreme leader.

That's in a world where you're not under attack.

It's in a world where you've got an institution which is firmly in place and has not lost enormous numbers of its leaders, senior clerics, senior politicians, senior military commanders.

And so exactly how this pans out in practice may be quite different.

Several figures are still around.

So we have the head of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larrajani.

He's acting as something of a power broker.

There are other people around who we have seen involved in the negotiations, such as the foreign minister, Arachi.