Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
European Oil Markets
20JUL

Tehran's first quiet morning in 37 years

3 min read
10:00UTC

Residents described the city as 'quiet' on Saturday — the first morning in 37 years without a Supreme Leader, and the first after a night of airstrikes on the capital's administrative core.

← Back to Brent tops $90 and freight follows this timeJump to analysis ↓
EconomicDeveloping
Key takeaway

Tehran's eerie quiet on the first morning without a Supreme Leader in 37 years reflects the intersection of genuine shock, communications blackout, and the uncertainty of a succession process being conducted under active bombardment.

Residents described Tehran as "quiet" on Saturday morning — the first in 37 years without a Supreme Leader. Ali Khamenei assumed the position in June 1989, two months after Ruhollah Khomeini's death. His killing in an Israeli airstrike on his compound , confirmed by Iranian state media, removed the figure who had shaped the Islamic Republic's political, military, and ideological direction for nearly four decades. Every Iranian under 40 has known no other supreme authority.

The quiet carries multiple explanations, none mutually exclusive. Iran's National Security Council had advised residents to leave Tehran . Israeli strikes had expanded into central Tehran the previous night, hitting near police headquarters and state television facilities . Supermarkets in northern Tehran had already run out of bread, eggs, water, and milk . For many residents, departure was the rational response. The "quiet" may be the sound of a city substantially emptied rather than a city at peace.

For those who remained, Saturday morning arrived in an information vacuum. With internet connectivity at 1% of normal, residents could not access news, contact family outside the city, or learn whether the strikes had ended or merely paused. IRGC personnel on motorbikes had been observed displaying weapons to intimidate residents . The celebrations that erupted in Tehran on the night of Khamenei's death — fireworks, chanting, public joy — had either subsided or been suppressed. The gap between Friday night's visible emotion and Saturday morning's reported stillness suggests a population recalibrating between relief, fear, and the practical question of survival under bombardment.

The three-person interim council named under Article 111 had not yet addressed the public. The Assembly of Experts — the 88-member clerical body constitutionally tasked with selecting a new Supreme Leader — cannot convene because its Tehran headquarters was destroyed in the strikes . No constitutional provision exists for the simultaneous loss of The Supreme Leader and the body that selects his successor. Tehran's quiet is the silence of a political system whose centre has been destroyed, with no mechanism yet identified to reconstitute it.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

For 37 years, Ayatollah Khamenei was not merely a head of state — he was the theological and political anchor of the entire Iranian system of government. The principle of Velayat-e Faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) holds that a supreme cleric's authority supersedes that of elected officials. Every major Iranian institution — the Revolutionary Guard, the judiciary, state media, the nuclear programme — ultimately reported to him. His death does not just create a political vacancy; it creates a constitutional and theological crisis about who holds ultimate authority while a successor is chosen. The 'quiet' in Tehran could mean many things: people are too frightened to go out, too stunned to process events, too cut off from information to know what is happening, or simply waiting to see who emerges with authority before acting.

Deep Analysis
Synthesis

The quiet in Tehran is one of the most analytically significant data points in this crisis, precisely because it is ambiguous. It could be read as legitimacy collapse — a population that has already internalised the end of the Islamic Republic and is waiting for confirmation — or as the temporary effect of information suppression. The Iranian government's decision to maintain the blackout suggests it fears the population is not quiescent but is being prevented from acting. The first morning without Khamenei will be studied as a historical inflection point regardless of what follows. Whether it is remembered as the beginning of a democratic transition, a factional civil war, or an authoritarian reconsolidation depends entirely on decisions being made in the next 72 hours.

Root Causes

The quiet is a product of compounding shocks: the assassination of the Supreme Leader, 48 hours of near-total communications blackout, active foreign bombardment, and the unprecedented nature of a constitutional succession crisis during wartime. There is no playbook for this. The Article 111 succession process was designed for a peaceful transition; it has never been stress-tested against simultaneous external military attack and domestic uprising. The Iranian population is, in effect, experiencing multiple regime-altering events simultaneously while cut off from the information needed to understand or respond to any of them.

Escalation

The quiet is fragile and its direction is unresolved. It could represent the calm before organised resistance, the numbness of a population absorbing simultaneous shocks, or the effective suppression of communication preventing any collective action from forming. The key variable is whether the Assembly of Experts can convene and reach consensus under wartime conditions — an outcome whose probability is genuinely uncertain. Each day that passes without a credible successor announcement deepens the political vacuum, as competing factions within the IRGC, the clerical establishment, and the reformist movement position for influence. A quiet Tehran today does not predict a quiet Tehran tomorrow.

What could happen next?
  • Risk

    A prolonged succession vacuum could fracture IRGC command authority, enabling factional actors to take independent military or political actions that neither a successor government nor external parties can predict or contain.

    Immediate · Assessed
  • Meaning

    The absence of public reaction in Tehran — positive or negative — reflects the success of the communications blackout in preventing collective action formation, not necessarily genuine popular acquiescence.

    Immediate · Assessed
  • Consequence

    The constitutional process under Article 111 will require the Assembly of Experts to convene under active bombardment, a process that could be disrupted by strikes, travel restrictions, or internal factional disagreement.

    Short term · Assessed
  • Precedent

    The first successful assassination of a sitting Supreme Leader establishes that such figures are not untouchable, potentially reshaping deterrence calculations for other theocratic and personalised authoritarian regimes.

    Long term · Suggested
Sources:Al Jazeera
Mentions:Qom →Assembly of Experts →Karim Sadjadpour →National Security Council (Iran) →United Nations Security Council (UNSC) →Iran →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Tehran →Ali Khamenei →Article 111 →
First Reported In

Update #6 · Pentagon produced no evidence for Iran war

Al Jazeera· 1 Mar 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
Caused by
Iran confirms Khamenei killed by Israel
Tehran's quiet morning described as first in 37 years without a Supreme Leader following Khamenei's killing
Occurred 1 Mar 2026
Read story →
This Event
Tehran's first quiet morning in 37 years
The reported quiet in Tehran reflects a population caught between the collapse of the old political order, active military bombardment, and mass civilian departure — a city suspended between the system that has ended and whatever replaces it.
Different Perspectives
Kuwait
Kuwait
Kuwait absorbed the Iranian strike that knocked generating units offline at a combined power-and-desalination plant on 17 July, the event that finally moved freight and insurance in lockstep with Brent. The strike hit essential civilian infrastructure, not a trading desk's benchmark.
Asian buyers (Singapore)
Asian buyers (Singapore)
Singapore's middle distillates rose 12% month-to-date to 8.91m barrels and fuel oil passed 19m barrels on a 105% net-import surge, buyers retaining barrels as the East-West arbitrage window narrows. Cargoes are being stockpiled ahead of further Hormuz-driven freight repricing rather than released west.
Austria (Coreper holdout)
Austria (Coreper holdout)
Vienna is blocking the same package over roughly EUR 2bn of frozen Russian assets earmarked for Raiffeisen, a domestic banking dispute with no connection to the oil cap racing toward its 23 July expiry. The linkage forces the whole package to wait on a bilateral compensation fight.
Greece (Coreper holdout)
Greece (Coreper holdout)
Athens is holding the 21st sanctions package at the 22 July Coreper vote over Russian LNG re-export rights, a condition unrelated to the oil price cap itself, leaving the $44.10 freeze one day from expiry without a deal. Greece's own tanker registry gives it a direct stake in how any shadow-fleet measures are drafted.
Marine underwriters (Gulf war-risk)
Marine underwriters (Gulf war-risk)
Hull war-risk cover for Hormuz transits widened to a 3-10% band on 17 July with 5% the emerging norm, up from a 3-4% baseline set in late June, the first repricing in six weeks to track a flat-price move rather than lag it. Cover resets on actuarial evidence of loss, not on diplomatic or price signals.
Money managers (CFTC-tracked)
Money managers (CFTC-tracked)
The CFTC's week-to-14-July snapshot, released 17 July, showed WTI managed-money net long collapsing 69% to 19,783 contracts and a standalone 60,141-contract net short on Brent Last Day (NYMEX). Both readings predate the Kuwait strike and the 20 July escalation, so any covering since is not yet visible in public data.