Regime could try to retain control of streets as US and Israel have expressed no intention of mounting ground invasion
Venezula’s Nicholás Maduro was captured. But Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have chosen a different strategy for Iran: to target and aim to kill the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, , and as many other senior regime figures as possible.
Though Iranian military sites and its air defence systems were also targeted by coordinated US and Israeli bombing, beginning in the morning, the most significant attack was on Khamenei’s compound in Tehran.
Film on social media showed heavy plumes of smoke emerging from the site in the capital following the daylight strike, and soon after satellite imagery showed it had been destroyed in what appeared to be a targeted attack.
Khamenei’s fate remains uncertain, but its intention was: an attempt to effect regime change in Iran through bombing and killing with no credible justification in international law. It is a tactic that is disturbingly easy to start, but its results are profoundly uncertain.
