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Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi says US-Israeli assassinations will not topple Tehran’s ‘strong political structure’.
Israel’s killing of Ali Larijani, the powerful secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, will not deal a fatal blow to Iran’s leadership, the country’s foreign minister said.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, aired after the killing of Larijani was confirmed by Tehran early on Wednesday, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi said the United States and Israel had yet to realise that Iran’s government does not rely on a single individual.
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“I do not know why the Americans and the Israelis still have not understood this point: The Islamic Republic of Iran has a strong political structure with established political, economic, and social institutions,” Araghchi said.
“The presence or absence of a single individual does not affect this structure,” he said.
“Of course, individuals are influential, and each person plays their role – some better, some worse, some less – but what matters is that the political system in Iran is a very solid structure.”
Araghchi pointed to the assassination of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of US-Israeli strikes on 28 February, noting that despite the huge national loss, “the system continued”.
“We have not had anyone more important than the leader himself, and even the leader was martyred, yet the system continued its work and immediately provided a replacement,” the foreign minister said.
“If anyone else is martyred, it will be the same,” he added.
“If the foreign minister were ever to be martyred, there would ultimately be someone else to take the position.”
The killing of Larijani, 67, a confidant of the slain Ali Khamenei and his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, in an attack on Monday night, marks the removal of the most senior figure in Tehran’s leadership since the opening air strikes of the war 19 days ago.
Iranian state media also confirmed on Tuesday that Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Basij forces, a paramilitary group within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was also killed in an “American-Zionist enemy” attack.
Commander of the Basij, the country’s most powerful internal security force for the past six years, Soleimani was reported to have emerged as a key leader in the fightback against the US-Israel war on Iran.
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said Israel had long engaged in the assassinations of its political adversaries, which was not a normal practice in warfare.
“In wars, you don’t start by killing political leaders, including elected leaders. That programme of assassination is gangster, it’s terrorism, it’s not the norm of war,” he said.
Bishara said that, while “the system in Iran is strong and the killing of one leader isn’t going to lead to the implosion of the system”, such targeted killings do have an impact in terms of “quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes”.
In the interview with Al Jazeera, Araghchi again said the growing conflict in the Gulf region and beyond was not of Tehran’s choosing, and the US must ultimately be held responsible.
“I will repeat: This war is not our war,” the minister said.
“We did not start it. The United States started it and is responsible for all the consequences of this war – human and financial – whether for Iran, for the region, or for the entire world,” he said.
“The United States must be held accountable,” he added.
