The Qom headquarters of the Assembly of Experts — Iran's 88-member clerical body constitutionally tasked with selecting and supervising The Supreme Leader — was struck directly in the US-Israeli operations. The building's destruction, combined with the confirmed deaths of senior officials, means the body cannot convene to fulfil its sole constitutionally mandated function: choosing Khamenei's successor.
Iran's 1979 constitution provides no alternative mechanism. No provision addresses the simultaneous loss of The Supreme Leader, the defence minister, the IRGC commander, and the selection body itself. Khomeini's constitutional architecture assumed institutional continuity — that the Assembly would outlive any individual leader and manage succession through deliberation among its clerical members. That architecture required the Assembly to exist as a functioning body.
The last Supreme Leader transition, from Khomeini to Khamenei in June 1989, took the Assembly two days to complete. Even that was a contested process. Khamenei was a compromise candidate — a mid-ranking cleric elevated because the originally designated successor, Hossein-Ali Montazeri, had been removed from the succession line months earlier after criticising the government's mass executions of political prisoners. Khamenei lacked the senior clerical credentials traditionally required for the role and spent years consolidating authority against more established ayatollahs.
The IRGC controls an estimated $100 billion economic empire spanning construction, telecommunications, energy, and financial services. Without the Assembly to provide constitutional legitimacy to a new leader, the question of who commands that empire — and the coercive apparatus of the state — will be resolved by power dynamics rather than legal procedure. Whether the IRGC consolidates under a single commander or fractures along factional lines — Quds Force against ground forces, hardliners against officers who recognise the need to accommodate the fourteen-month protest movement — will define Iran's political trajectory.
