The Israeli bombing that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Saturday not only brought the demise of one of the central global political figures of the last half century, it also represented something almost unprecedented in modern warfare: the successful killing of an enemy head of state by a foreign military.
You have to go back to the same year as the Iranian revolution to find a roughly parallel operation. The nearest precedent for the killing of a head of state may be the KGB assasination of Afghan Communist leader Hafizullah Amin in 1979, the prelude to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that led to a bloody decade long war.
And while the strike that killed Khamenei is probably not illegal under the laws of war, it’s a dramatic, escalatory tactic with enormous potential for unintended consequences for all countries if it becomes normalized.
Killing foreign leaders has become extraordinarily rare
In centuries past, leaders like Persia’s Cyrus the Great and England’s Richard III personally led their troops into battle and often suffered the consequences. But in modern times, they nearly always stay well back from the front lines or, when under bombardment, in heavily fortified facilities, leaving others to do the killing and dying.
The fact that Khamanei was apparently holding a meeting with senior officials in his well-known compound in Tehran, despite abundant indications that airstrikes were imminent, was surprising in that context. The New York Times reported that he told his inner circle he took on the risk because he wanted to avoid the appearance of hiding.
The lack of similar “decapitation” operations against world leaders has not been for lack of trying. The initial “Shock and Awe” campaign of US airstrikes in Iraq in 2003 deliberately targeted Saddam Hussein, who had, in turn, presided over a plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in 1993. The Reagan administration unsuccessfully targeted Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi by bombing one of his compounds in 1986. Airstrikes targeted Qaddafi’s compounds again during the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. (Qaddafi was eventually killed by Libyan rebels after fleeing.) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reportedly survived multiple assassination attempts since the Russian invasion in 2022.
Other high-value targets have been killed in operations similar to the one that struck Khamenei’s compound. Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, in 2024; the US killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019; and Russia killed Dzhokar Dudayev, President of the breakaway Republic of Chechnya in 1996, but none of these were the heads of internationally recognized states.
What the law says about assassination
Is killing an enemy head of state in war legal? For the most part, yes. A civilian head of state who is the commander of a country’s armed forces (as the supreme leader of Iran is) is considered a legitimate military target, not particularly different than someone like Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor mastermind shot down by the US military in 1943, or the many Russian generals targeted by Ukraine.
International law prohibits the killing of military or government personnel by means of “treachery” — a breach of trust like feigning surrender or impersonating UN officials — but given President Donald Trump’s many warnings about impending airstrikes, that would be a tough claim for Iran to make in this case. (Whether the war itself is legal, given that it arguably violates international prohibitions on the use of force against other states except in cases of self-defense, is an important but separate question.)
US law, codified in executive orders by both Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, also prohibits US government employees from engaging in assassination. This prohibition came in the wake of congressional investigations that revealed the CIA’s role in the killings of leaders like the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, and Chile’s Salvador Allende, as well as plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
But in those cases, the US was not at war with these leaders’ countries at the time it helped kill them. (How “war” is defined in cases like US drone strikes against al-Qaida leaders outside of declared war zones or the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq is a more controversial issue.)
“Assassination usually has political motives. It occurs outside the context of unarmed conflict,” said Michael Schmitt, a professor of international law at the University of Reading and former US Air Force Judge Advocate General. “Once the bombs begin to drop, then you immediately shift from over to the law of armed conflict to determine who may be attacked and who may not.”
There are other reasons countries avoid killing enemy leaders
The fact that the killing of heads of state as a military tactic, has, in practice, been used pretty sparingly, probably has more to do with custom and political considerations than law.
For one thing, it can be harder to negotiate a quick end to the war if you’ve killed the person you would want to negotiate with. For another thing, killing a leader can make your adversary want to fight harder rather than surrender.
During World War II, British intelligence services had several active plots in development to kill Adolf Hitler, but, even then, some officials were concerned about turning him into a martyr. In the lead-up to the first Gulf War, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney fired Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Dugan for telling reporters about plans to “decapitate” the Iraqi leadership by targeting Saddam Hussein and his family. (The US did ultimately end up striking Saddam’s compounds in that war. The problem was, apparently, more that Dugan was talking about it.)
In the Khamenei case, the killing is a good indication that, at this point, Israel, with US support, is more interested in destroying this regime rather than making a deal with it. But even though the CIA reportedly provided Israel with intelligence that led to the strike, officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have made clear that the strike was an Israeli operation and that the US is not itself targeting Iranian leaders.
“To assassinate a head of state, who is also a religious figure, I think that even under Trump, the United States, would prefer that Israel is the one to do it,” said Shira Efron, a former Israeli government adviser now at the Rand Corporation.
Trump himself has not quite stayed on script. “I got him before he got me,” he told ABC News, referring to several Iran-backed assassination plots against him.
His quote illustrates another likely reason why leaders have avoided normalizing assassination as a method of war: They’d prefer it not happen to them. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas dinner, as the saying goes.
A troubling new frontier of assassinations
The death of Khamenei may be the first of its kind in nearly a half-century, but it may also be a sign of more to come in the near future.
We’re living in a world where wars, including wars between sovereign states, are becoming more common again after years of decline. There is also data to suggest that political assassinations are becoming more common — a danger Trump, of all people, is well aware of.
Technological advances in precision bombing and satellites have made it easier to target individuals at great distances. Drones, which can be manufactured more cheaply and deployed more easily by less-advanced militaries or proxy forces, add a new deadly means of assassination.
The allies may have been able to massively bomb Berlin, but they had little hope of knowing exactly where to drop one to kill Hitler. Today, that’s a reality, and the reported use of Anthropic’s Claude system in the Khamenei strike suggests artificial intelligence may soon make it even easier.
A world where heads of state are not only considered legitimate targets in war but easily hit ones is a world those heads of state might want to think twice about ushering in.
