Israel strikes Iran's Council of Experts as it votes on a new supreme leader

Iran Council of Experts is an 88-member body of elected Islamic scholars with one constitutional purpose that no other Iranian institution shares: selecting and dismissing the Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had held the Supreme Leader position since 1989, was killed in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, 2026. The Council convening to select his successor was therefore not a political event that could be deferred — it was a constitutional emergency. The Council had been in session for two days by March 3.

Israeli forces struck the building in Tehran where the Council of Experts was meeting on the morning of March 3. An IDF official told Axios the explicit purpose was to prevent the Council from completing its vote and selecting a new supreme leader. At least 34 of the 88 council members were killed and more than 40 others wounded. Under Iranian constitutional law, a valid supreme leader selection requires a two-thirds quorum of the Council. The strike destroyed that quorum and made a legally valid vote impossible, leaving Iran in an unprecedented constitutional vacuum with no clear path to legitimately reconstitute supreme executive authority.

The targeting of the Council of Experts was qualitatively different from targeting Iran military or nuclear infrastructure. Military targets threaten the attacking state security directly. The Council of Experts is a political-constitutional body whose function is governance, not warfare. International law scholars at the American Society of International Law noted that the strike crossed the line from attacking a military threat to attacking a country political system — a distinction that self-defense doctrine does not permit. Chatham House MWMarc Weller called the combined operations a war of regime imposition rather than self-defense, and said the Council strike was the clearest example of the difference.

The Wall Street Journal reported on March 3 that the Trump administration had been in direct contact with Kurdish factions in northwestern Iran, Baluchi separatist groups in southeastern Iran, and other ethnic minority organizations. The administration was described as weighing military and financial support to these groups to accelerate the fragmentation of central government authority. The contacts represented an active U.S. role in shaping what would replace the political system being dismantled — not just the military campaign that was dismantling it.

The combination of Khamenei killing and the Council of Experts strike left Iran institutional power structure without legitimate authority over the country most dangerous assets. The Supreme Leader is the commander of Iran armed forces — both the regular military and the IRGC — and the ultimate authority over Iran nuclear program. Without a supreme leader, those chains of command operated through informal authority, institutional loyalty, and factional power rather than constitutional legitimacy. Defense analysts warned this was the most dangerous period: a state with nuclear materials, conventional weapons, and trained armed forces operating without clear central civilian control.

The Wall Street Journal reporting on ethnic minority outreach paralleled the playbook used in the early months of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, which had also involved U.S. support for opposition factions to fill the power vacuum created by toppling the sitting government. In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance filled the initial vacuum before the Taliban reconstituted. In Iraq, Kurdish and Shia factions initially aligned with the U.S. before the power vacuum became a decade-long civil war. Defense analysts at the Brookings Institution noted that Iran IRGC — with 150,000 personnel and independent financial resources — would not dissolve in the way Saddam army had; it would become a faction competing for power.

Iran population of 89 million includes Persians (61 percent), Azerbaijanis (16 percent), Kurds (10 percent), Arabs, Baluchi, and Turkmen minorities. The country has a 2,500-year history of centralized imperial governance and a 40-year-old revolutionary institutional structure with deep roots in the Shia clerical establishment. The U.S. contacts with Kurdish and Baluchi factions were contacts with groups that represent perhaps 15 to 20 percent of the population and have historically failed to convert military capability into stable governance in their own regions, let alone nationally.

The IRGC — Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps — was the wild card in every post-conflict scenario analysts modeled. The IRGC is not a conventional military force that takes orders from a civilian chain of command. It is a parallel state within the state, with its own intelligence services, its own business empire, its own political relationships with proxy forces across the Middle East, and a decades-long institutional identity tied to the Islamic Republic founding ideology. The IRGC response to the Council of Experts strike — whether to seek a negotiated end to the conflict, accelerate attacks on U.S. forces, or pursue internal power consolidation — was the variable that would most determine what Iran looked like in six months.

No administration official had publicly described a post-conflict governance plan for Iran by March 3. The absence of a public plan was not by itself unusual — military operations are typically not accompanied by public governance blueprints. But the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences had established what the absence of a plan meant in practice: the military could win every battle and still lose the peace because no one had thought through what came after. Congressional Democrats and some Republican defense hawks began demanding a classified briefing on Iran post-conflict planning — not to stop the war, but to avoid repeating the documented failures of the previous two externally imposed political transitions.

Russia and China both issued formal diplomatic statements condemning the Council of Experts strike as an unprecedented violation of state sovereignty. Russia Foreign Ministry called it political assassination at the institutional level. China Foreign Ministry said the strike proved the U.S. and Israel sought permanent destabilization rather than security. Neither country introduced a UN Security Council resolution — calculating that a U.S. veto would be preferable to losing the diplomatic issue as leverage. But their statements created a diplomatic record that would shape how non-Western countries evaluated U.S. global leadership for years.