Damascus, February 2008. A cold night blanketed the Kfar Sousa district, an enclave of luxury villas and heavily secured government buildings. In the shadows, far from the watchful eyes of Syrian intelligence apparatus, one of the most sensitive operations of recent decades was underway, a joint CIA and Mossad mission to eliminate arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.
Since the 1980s, he had evaded every manhunt, constantly changing his appearance and identity, but that night technology finally closed in on him. His assassination created a vacuum at the top of Hezbollah and led to a tremendous loss of operational knowledge, as he had been the glue connecting Tehran and Beirut. Mughniyeh’s killing was not merely an act of retribution, but the removal of a man considered uniquely dangerous in his destructive capabilities.
Indeed, there are figures who cannot truly be replaced. They are not merely symbols, but the brains and beating heart of sophisticated terror systems built in their own image. The assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, ordered by President Trump during his first term, was one such case. With the disappearance of figures like Hassan Nasrallah, the Sinwar brothers or Mohammed Deif, a terror organization loses not only a commander, but part of its identity, alongside severe damage to its command-and-control capabilities.
But the other side of targeted killings is far more complicated, and far less popular. Sometimes an assassination can prove to be a strategic mistake, particularly when the target serves as a relatively moderate or bridging figure compared to his peers. Ali Larijani, former secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and one of the architects of the 2015 nuclear deal during the Obama era (JCPOA), is a good example. A man whose hands are stained with the blood of thousands of murdered Iranian protesters, Larijani nevertheless spent most of his adult life in sensitive diplomatic roles and frequently traveled through European capitals. For years, he served as the “smiling face” of the murderous ayatollah regime. Naturally, his more moderate positions were not always welcomed in Tehran, though they were still valued within the Supreme Leader Khamenei’s inner circle.
Larijani removal from the stage does not serve the strategic objective, assuming one still exists, of President Trump at this moment. The U.S is struggling, to put it mildly, to formulate an exit strategy for the war in the Persian Gulf. The emerging agreement appears to lack a series of critical components necessary for the security of Israel and the region. Meanwhile, Trump has already been forced to extend, for the seventh time, the deadline he himself set for a return to war, while the U.S. military continues to spend weeks bogged down in friction below the threshold of full-scale conflict in the murky waters of the Gulf. As a result, Republicans are bleeding politically on the domestic front, steadily losing popularity week after week, raising fears of a defeat in the congressional midterm elections in roughly six months.
The vacuum left by Larijani has effectively handed an already fanatical arena over to even more extreme figures, as a senior Israeli security official noted in this media outlet last week. With the elimination of the regime’s most pragmatic figure, effective channels of dialogue were severed. The void he left behind has become increasingly apparent, while the influence of senior IRGC commanders around the decision-making table is now stronger than ever. Consequently, the regime’s decision-making process has become increasingly unpredictable, surprising, as Western intelligence agencies are already discovering firsthand, and above all, far less open to diplomatic arrangements.
The smaller problem begins with Washington’s difficulty in bringing the conflict to a close. The far greater danger is that the regime could ultimately abandon the nuclear strategy it has carefully maintained for three decades, and break toward a nuclear weapon. The decision to target Larijani, and other relatively moderate figures within the regime, should have emerged from a sober strategic debate over the benefits and risks involved, not merely from the operational opportunity created amid what increasingly appears to be the fantasy of collapsing the ayatollah regime through military force alone. Because in the colorful Persian bazaar of the Middle East, every assassination comes at a price.