Sune Rasmussen

I think it would be a bit cavalier to say that the killing of Khamenei doesn't change anything.

But the Iranian system has been built to sort of not rely on one person, even if that person like Khamenei, like the supreme leader, has the final say on all matters of national security.

He always surrounded himself with a lot of advisors and relegated decision-making to a lot of people around him, military commanders, but also political, civilian officials, and probably in preparation for something like this.

Yeah, actually, it's happening according to the Constitution in what I guess you would call an orderly fashion considering the circumstances.

The first step is to form a three-man council, and that council consists of the president, the head of the judiciary, and then a member of what's known as the guardian council, which is a powerful clerical council.

That has been formed, and they are now sort of the interim leadership council.

Then what's known as the assembly of experts will select a new supreme leader.

How long that's going to take, we don't know.

I think the nature of what we call the regime or the Islamic system in the Islamic Republic will be different because Ayatollah Khamenei was so powerful and he kind of weeded out all clerical rivals.

We should say that the supreme leader has to be a cleric and he has to be a cleric of a certain rank as well, has to be an Ayatollah.

But there is no immediate successor here.

And that is partly by design, because he also didn't want anyone to challenge his authority while he was alive.

I think the next supreme leader is going to be a person that has a much more ceremonial role in Iran.

I think we'll see more sort of a collective leadership working behind the scenes.

It's a lot of people and it's a lot of different bodies.

It's clerical bodies, it's also the military, especially the Revolutionary Guard, which is a political and economic behemoth.

And all these people, we're talking hundreds of thousands of people who are either in the regime or dependent on the regime.

So a regime change, like we saw, for example, in Iraq, that would mean uprooting this whole structure in the system.

Yeah, and I think in brief, no, we're not seeing any signs of defections or people laying down arms yet.

He is right that a lot of senior commanders have been killed in this wave of strikes, and a lot were killed last year during the war with Israel.