If it was not the nuclear matter, they would have come up with something else – the pressure they are putting us under is reason enough for us to be suspicious. It was a revealing moment of clarity into the state of mind of a man who otherwise appeared to be inscrutable, an impression compounded by the fact that Larijani was talking to us through an interpreter.
Appearing on state television just 24 hours after US-Israeli air strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, Mohammad Pakpour, Larijani delivered a message of fire. America and the Zionist regime [Israel] have set the heart of the Iranian nation ablaze, he wrote on social media. We will burn their hearts.
In Iran today, the central question is not who will replace Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but rather who is best positioned to decide how that transition would be managed. The question matters because, in the Islamic Republic, such a transition would not only be a constitutional issue. Above all, it would be a test of cohesion among institutions, factions, and security apparatuses.
New penalties come as US President Trump welcomes purported Iranian decision to halt execution of antigovernment demonstrators. The United States has imposed new sanctions against Iran, targeting political and security officials over the crackdown on antigovernment protesters, amid US President Donald Trump's threats to intervene militarily against the country. The US penalties on Tuesday targeted Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNCS), and several other officials, who it said were the architects of Tehran's brutal response to the demonstrations.