On February 28th, 2026, Khamenei was killed.
Western strategists calculated that without the supreme leader, the regime would collapse.
They were wrong.
The regime did not collapse.
It mutated.
And while the entire world was discussing the death of one man, another quietly, methodically, without a single press conference took control of the army, the intelligence services, the nuclear program, and 88 million people.
This man is wanted by Interpol.
His name is linked to hundreds of deaths on three continents.
He never appears in public.
And today, he is the de facto ruler of Iran.
But that is only half the story.
Because inside the organization he now leads, a war is raging.
Generals against generals.
Intelligence against intelligence.
And it is precisely this war, the one Mossad is studying more closely than anything else, that has become Iran’s greatest vulnerability.
This is the full investigation.
And it begins right now.
If you want to understand who really controls Iran, and why the war inside the IRGC matters more than any missile, subscribe and hit the bell.
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To understand what happened to Iran after February 28th, you first need to understand what the Islamic Republic [music] actually was before the bombs fell.
Most people looking at Iran from the outside saw a theocracy, a country run by Ayatollahs in religious robes making decisions [music] based on divine interpretation of Islamic law.
That picture was never quite accurate.
But for 47 years, it was close enough to functional that the system held together.
The reason it held was not ideology.
It was architecture.
The Islamic Republic was built on what analysts called competitive oligarchy, multiple power centers.
The supreme leader, the IRGC, the elected government, the clerical establishment in Qom, the judiciary, existed in permanent and deliberate tension with one another.
No single faction controlled everything, and that arrangement was not a flaw in the design.
It was the design.
Because when one faction grew too powerful, the others pushed back.
And standing above all of them, acting as the ultimate arbiter of every major dispute, was the supreme leader.
Khamenei did not rule Iran the way a president rules a democracy.
>> [music] >> He ruled it the way a mafia don rules a criminal organization, not by making every decision himself, but by deciding which decisions each subordinate was allowed to make, and punishing those who reached too far.
That system had kept the Islamic Republic stable through eight years of war with Iraq, through crushing international sanctions, through the Green Movement uprising of 2009, through the targeted assassination of its generals, [music] and the systematic destruction of its nuclear scientists.
It was not [music] an elegant system.
It was not a just one.
But it was a remarkably resilient one.
And then, on the morning of February 28th, 2026, the arbiter died.
30 precision munitions struck the above-ground office complex at the Pasteur Street compound in central Tehran.
What they destroyed was not just a building.
They destroyed the one mechanism that had held the entire system in balance for more than three [music] decades.
With Khamenei gone, there was no longer anyone with the authority or the legitimacy to regulate the competition between factions.
There was no [music] longer a referee.
There was only the arena and the contestants inside it, each calculating how quickly they could seize everything before someone else did.
The regime did not collapse.
Western strategists had hoped it would.
They had assumed that removing the supreme leader would trigger a cascade of institutional failure, popular uprising, and political transition.
That assumption was wrong.
Not because the Iranian people were loyal to the regime.
Evidence from the streets of Tehran in the weeks following the strike showed exactly the opposite.
But because the IRGC did not need [music] public legitimacy to maintain control.
It needed guns.
And it had plenty of those.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was founded in 1979 with a single explicit purpose.
To defend the revolutionary system against its enemies, both foreign and domestic.
It was not designed to be a conventional military force.
It was designed to be a political army, a force whose primary loyalty was to the ideology of the revolution, not to the nation of Iran.
Over the following decades, the IRGC grew into something far beyond that original mandate.
By 2026, it was a state within the state, controlling its own economy, >> [music] >> running its own intelligence apparatus, managing its own foreign policy through proxy forces [music] stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, >> [clears throat]
>> and deploying its own media infrastructure to shape public information inside Iran.
Its own air force.
Its own navy.
Its own missile forces.
Its own banks.
Its own black market trading networks.
It answered to no civilian authority.
It answered to the supreme leader, and the supreme leader alone.
When the supreme leader died, the IRGC did not lose its master.
It lost its leash.
Aaron David Miller, a former American diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it plainly in the days following the strike.
We have moved from divine authority to brute force.
From clerical influence to the influence of the core.
That is how Iran is governed now.
He was right.
But what he did not fully explain, and what almost no one in the Western media was covering in those first chaotic weeks, was that the IRGC was not a unified force moving in a single direction.
It was a fractured organization pulling itself apart from the inside, driven by competing ambitions, paranoid suspicions, and a struggle for resources that had become, [music] in the absence of any external arbiter, a war of all against all.
To understand why, you need to understand something fundamental about how power actually works inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The IRGC is not a military organization that also happens to have political influence.
It is a political organization that also happens to have a military.
That distinction matters enormously, because political organizations do not fight their enemies the way armies [music] fight enemies.
They fight them the way political factions fight each other.
Through maneuvering, through alliances, through calculated betrayal, through the careful accumulation and sudden deployment of leverage.
And when the supreme authority that once kept internal competition within acceptable limits is suddenly, violently removed, that kind of political fighting turns vicious with extraordinary speed.
That is exactly [music] what happened inside the IRGC after February 28th.
Generals [music] who despised each other for years stood side by side for the cameras.
Statements of unity were issued.
The appearance of solidarity was carefully maintained, but appearances are expensive to sustain.
And behind the closed doors of the IRGC’s command structure, >> [music] >> the competition for resources, for command positions, for access to the financial networks that represented real power in the new Iran, that competition had already begun.
The fractures, however, did not begin on February 28th.
They had been deepening for years, accelerated by a sequence of losses that stripped the organization of its most capable leaders, one by one, with methodical precision.
To understand the full depth of those fractures, you need to go back to a cold January night in 2020, to a road near Baghdad International Airport, and to the death of the one man who, more than anyone else, had held the entire structure together from the inside.
His name was Qassem Soleimani.
And everything [music] that has happened inside the IRGC since that night, every leadership crisis, every failed proxy operation, every act of desperate improvisation that has made the organization simultaneously more dangerous >> [music] >> and less coherent, traces back, in one way or another, to the void he left behind.
The strike that killed him lasted less than 30 seconds.
The damage it caused to the IRGC is still unfolding today.
Qassem Soleimani was not simply a general.
In the words of Iranian officials themselves, he was Iran’s shadow foreign minister.
The single human being around whom the entire architecture of the Islamic Republic’s external power [music] was organized.
He did not command the proxy network that Iran had spent four decades building.
He was the proxy network.
The difference matters more than it might initially appear.
To understand what Soleimani was, you need to understand what the axis of resistance actually required to function.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi movement in Yemen.
Dozens of Shia militia groups scattered across Iraq and Syria.
Each of these organizations had its own leadership, its own internal politics, its own local grievances and ambitions that had nothing to do with Tehran.
Binding them into a coherent strategic force required something no bureaucratic structure could provide.
[music] Personal relationships built over decades.
Founded on trust.
Maintained through constant direct contact.
Soleimani provided all of it.
He had recruited many of these leaders personally.
He had sat with them through their most desperate moments.
He had flown into Damascus during the worst [music] days of the Syrian civil war to personally coordinate the Iranian and Hezbollah response.
He had walked into Baghdad in the chaos of the ISIS offensive in 2014 and personally organized the militia response that stopped the Islamic State’s advance.
He was not managing a network from Tehran.
He was inside it.
Every day.
Everywhere at once.
January 3rd, 2020.
A United States military drone fired missiles at a convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport.
The convoy was carrying Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, >> [music] >> the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces.
Both were killed instantly.
The strike lasted less than 30 seconds.
The damage it caused [music] to the IRGC would take years to fully measure.
Esmail Qaani was named as Soleimani’s replacement at the head of the Quds Force within 24 hours of the strike.
The speed of the appointment was deliberate.
The regime understood that any visible hesitation would be read as weakness both internally and by its enemies.
Qaani was a reasonable choice by any conventional measure.
He had served in the Quds Force for decades.
He had operational experience across multiple theaters.
He was ideologically committed and personally loyal to the system.
But Qaani was not Soleimani and the proxy commanders across the region understood this immediately.
The problem was not competence.
The problem was architecture.
[music] The axis of resistance had been built around one man’s personal authority.
Not around institutional structures that could survive the replacement of their chief.
When Hezbollah commanders in Beirut needed a decision, they’d called Soleimani.
When Iraqi militia leaders disagreed with each other, Soleimani arbitrated.
When the Houthis needed additional targeting data or technical advisers, Soleimani arranged it.
That entire system of informal authority, the system that actually made the axis of resistance function, [music] died with him on that road outside Baghdad.
Qaani could issue orders.
What he could not do was make those orders carry the same weight.
Within 18 months of Soleimani’s death, the fractures in the proxy network were becoming visible.
Coordination between factions deteriorated.
[music] Operations that Soleimani would have synchronized across multiple theaters were increasingly executed independently without integration with diminishing strategic coherence.
The axis of resistance did not collapse, but it began to move like a body whose nervous system had been damaged.
Still capable of action, but no longer capable of the [music] kind of precise coordinated response that had once made it genuinely formidable.
And then the losses at the very top of the IRGC itself began compounding.
In June of 2025, Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the man who had held the highest military rank in the entire organization since 2019, was killed.
His death removed not just a commander.
It removed the institutional continuity his long tenure had provided through the most turbulent years the organization had ever faced.
His replacement was Mohammad Pakpour, a career IRGC officer with significant experience in ground operations.
Pakpour was competent.
He understood the organization, but he was inheriting a command structure already under severe stress.
One that had been losing experienced officers at every level for the better part of five years.
And was now being asked to manage an active large-scale military conflict against two of the most capable armed forces in the world.
He had less than nine months before he too was dead.
On February 28th, 2026, the same morning the strike killed Khamenei, a coordinated targeting package also eliminated Pakpour and Majid Haddami, the head of IRGC intelligence.
Both were killed at separate locations within minutes of the Pasteur Street strike.
The simultaneity was not accidental.
[music] American and Israeli planners had specifically constructed the targeting package to decapitate the IRGC’s command structure and its intelligence apparatus in a single operational window to ensure that no senior commander survived who might be capable of organizing an immediate coherent military response.
The plan worked.
But the consequences extended far beyond the operational window.
By the morning of March 1st, 2026, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had lost within the span of approximately eight months its commander, its intelligence chief, and the supreme leader himself.
The external authority to whom it had ultimately answered for 47 years was gone.
What remained of the leadership structure was, in the assessment of the Institute for the Study of War, a second and third-tier officer corps that had been designed as a backup, >> [music] >> not as a governing body.
Those officers were now governing a country.
The IRGC’s internal protocols for command succession under wartime conditions called for the promotion of officers at least two full ranks below the fallen commander.
In practice, the losses [music] had been so severe and had occurred at so many levels simultaneously that actual promotions were coming from three and sometimes four ranks below the positions being filled.
These were not officers who had been groomed for strategic command.
They were operational and tactical commanders.
Men who understood how to execute missions, how to run provincial units, how to manage logistics in the field.
What they did not have was the institutional knowledge, the political network, or the strategic experience to manage an organization controlling 30 to [music] 40% of the Iranian economy while simultaneously fighting a war on multiple fronts.
And every single one of them understood one more thing with cold, unambiguous [music] clarity.
They were next.
This was not paranoia.
This was arithmetic.
Every commander who had held the senior position in the IRGC since 2020 was either dead, under arrest, or had disappeared from public view under circumstances that were never explained.
Qaani himself, the man who had survived three separate Israeli strikes >> [music] >> and, against all probability, managed to keep the Quds Force functioning in the years after Soleimani, was arrested [music] in early 2026 on suspicion of espionage.
The charges alleged he had been operating as a source for Mossad and the CIA.
Whether those charges were accurate, fabricated [music] by internal rivals, or some combination of the two, the effect was the same.
[music] The last thread of institutional continuity connecting the post-Soleimani IRGC to the organization it had once been was cut.
The new commanders operated in an environment where the question was no longer whether Mossad was inside their organization.
The evidence that it was had become undeniable.
The question, the one that consumed every internal meeting, every briefing, every quiet conversation between officers who had known each other for decades, was which of the people sitting in the same room was the asset? That question [music] was unanswerable.
And the attempt to answer it was tearing the IRGC apart faster than any external strike could manage.
Into this void, this collapsing leaderless organization desperately searching for someone capable of imposing order, stepped one man.
He had not been elevated by accident or by elimination alone.
He had been positioning himself for exactly this moment for decades with a patience and a calculation that his enemies had consistently underestimated.
His name was Ahmad Vahidi.
And what he did next would determine the future of 88 million people.
Ahmad Vahidi’s name does not appear in most Western news coverage of Iran.
He does not give speeches.
He does not meet foreign journalists.
He does not attend international summits or pose for photographs with visiting dignitaries.
He is the kind of man who has spent an entire career making himself difficult to see.
And who has wielded enormous power precisely because of it.
But Interpol knows his name.
Since 2007, Vahidi has been the subject of an active Interpol red notice, the closest thing the international law enforcement community has to a global arrest warrant, in connection with one of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the 20th century.
The government of Argentina, which lost 85 of its citizens in that attack, has been demanding his extradition for nearly three decades.
He has never faced [music] trial.
He has never been arrested.
He has, in fact, spent the years since that Interpol notice was issued serving as the Minister of Defense of the Islamic Republic of Iran, then as its Minister of Interior, and now as the de facto ruler of the entire country.
To understand how Ahmad Vahidi arrived at that position, you need to begin not with his crimes, but with his origins.
Because what Vahidi represents is not an anomaly in the IRGC system.
He is the system.
Its logic, its values, and its methods >> [music] >> concentrated in a single biography.
Vahidi was born in 1958 in the city of Kerman in southeastern Iran.
He was a young man when the Islamic Revolution swept away the Shah’s government in 1979.
[music] Old enough to be shaped by it, young enough to grow up entirely within the institutions it created.
He joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in its earliest years in the chaotic period immediately following the revolution and proved himself during the Iran-Iraq War, >> [music] >> the brutal eight-year conflict that consumed a generation of young Iranians and produced the officer corps that would go on to dominate the Islamic
Republic security apparatus for the next four decades.
By 1983, Vahidi had moved into the IRGC’s clandestine external operations unit, the secretive forerunner of what would eventually become the Quds Force.
It was through this unit that the IRGC was already projecting Iranian power into Lebanon, training and organizing the armed movement that the [music] world would come to know as Hezbollah.
And it was in the context of that relationship between the IRGC’s early external operations apparatus and its Lebanese proxy that Vahidi’s name first appeared in Western intelligence files.
On October 23rd, 1983, a truck laden with approximately 9,000 kg of explosives >> [music] >> was driven into the lobby of the United States Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and detonated.
241 American servicemen were killed.
The deadliest single-day loss of American military life since the Second World War.
A near simultaneous strike killed 58 French paratroopers at a separate location.
The attack was carried out by Hezbollah operating under direct guidance from the IRGC’s external operations apparatus in Tehran.
American investigators and federal courts have consistently identified Iranian state involvement in the planning and facilitation [music] of the operation.
Vahidi’s name appears in multiple American legal proceedings connected to that apparatus.
He has denied involvement.
He has never been given the opportunity to make that denial [music] in a court of law.
His defining institutional moment came in 1988 when the IRGC formally reorganized and expanded [music] its external operations division into what became the Quds Force.
Vahidi was named as its first commander.
He was 30 years old.
The Quds Force [music] in its earliest years was not yet the sprawling, sophisticated organization it would become under Soleimani.
It was a small, deeply secretive unit tasked with exporting the Islamic Revolution beyond Iran’s borders, training, funding, and directing armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, and across the broader Muslim world.
Vahidi built it from the ground up.
He established its operational culture, its recruitment practices, its relationship with the proxy organizations that would eventually form the axis of resistance.
For nine years, from 1988 to 1997, he commanded it, laying the infrastructure on which every subsequent Quds Force commander, including Soleimani himself, would operate.
And during those nine years, the organization he led left marks across three continents.
The most formally documented came on July 18th, 1994.
A car bomb detonated outside the headquarters of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, the AMIA building in Buenos Aires.
85 people were killed.
More than 300 were wounded.
It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history.
Argentine prosecutors, after years of investigation, concluded that the operation had been planned and authorized at the highest levels of the Iranian government and carried out by Hezbollah operatives under direct direction from Tehran.
Among the Iranian officials named in the Argentine federal indictment, Ahmad Vahidi, the serving commander of the Quds [music] Force.
In 2007, at Argentina’s formal request, Interpol issued red notices for Vahidi and five other Iranian officials.
At that exact moment, Vahidi was serving as Deputy Minister of Defense of the Islamic Republic [music] of Iran.
Two years later, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nominated him to serve as full Minister of Defense.
When the nomination was announced, Argentina filed a formal diplomatic protest.
Brazil, where Vahidi was briefly present during a regional summit, faced intense international pressure to arrest him.
He was allowed to leave.
He was confirmed as Minister of Defense.
He served in that role until 2013.
But there was one chapter of Vahidi’s career that Western intelligence agencies considered more consequential than any of the others.
In the late 1980s, during his tenure as the founding commander of the Quds Force, Vahidi was among the senior IRGC figures who accompanied Khamenei on a secret visit to North Korea.
The purpose of that visit was the acquisition of ballistic missile technology and early nuclear development knowledge, the foundation of the programs that would eventually make Iran one of the most dangerous proliferation threats on the planet.
Vahidi was not a passenger on that trip.
He was one of its architects.
The man who had helped build Iran’s external operations infrastructure from scratch was now helping to build its strategic weapons programs from the same blueprint.
After 2013, Vahidi moved from defense to domestic [music] security, serving as Minister of Interior under President Raisi, a role that gave him direct command over Iran’s internal security apparatus, its border forces, and the administrative infrastructure of the state.
He was accumulating instruments of power with the patience of a man who understood that the moment to use them had not yet arrived.
That moment came in June of 2025 when Hussein Salami was killed.
Vahidi assumed temporary command of the IRGC.
When Mohammad Pakpour was eliminated on February that temporary appointment became permanent.
But raw command authority was not the only instrument Vahidi had moved to secure.
According to reporting by Iran International, Vahidi simultaneously blocked President Masoud Pezeshkian’s attempt to appoint a new Minister of Intelligence, informing the President’s office with unmistakable directness that in wartime conditions, all significant security appointments would be made by the IRGC.
The President did not push [music] back.
And then there was the question of the Supreme Leader.
Khamenei was dead.
The Assembly of Experts, the clerical body formally empowered to select a new Supreme Leader, was convened.
According to reporting by the New York Times and multiple regional intelligence sources, it was Vahidi and his closest allies who drove the outcome of that process.
The candidate they supported was Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead Supreme Leader’s own son.
Mojtaba had no serious clerical credentials.
>> [music] >> He had spent his career in the shadows of the intelligence world, not in the theological seminaries of Qom.
He was, by the assessment of virtually every regional analyst who examined his record, entirely unqualified for the role of Supreme Leader by any conventional religious standard.
That was precisely why Vahidi wanted him.
A weak Supreme Leader, one who lacked independent authority, independent networks, and independent public legitimacy >> [music] >> was not a check on IRGC power.
He was a rubber stamp for it.
Mojtaba Khamenei was named Supreme Leader on March 9th, 2026.
Over the following 35 days, he made no public appearances.
He delivered no speeches.
[music] He issued no independent policy statements.
According to assessments by Reuters and the Institute for the Study of War, the new supreme leader’s authority was entirely nominal.
A ritual position maintained to preserve the theological legitimacy the regime still required, while real decisions were made [music] elsewhere.
That elsewhere had a name.
Ahmad Vahidi.
And two men he kept closest to him.
Mohammad Hussein Zolghadr served as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the body coordinating Iran’s military strategy, intelligence activities, and [music] nuclear negotiations.
Qassem Abdollahi Aliabadi commanded the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the IRGC’s massive engineering conglomerate that functioned simultaneously as a contracting empire, a sanctions evasion network, and the primary [music] vehicle for the
organization’s economic power.
Together, these three men, Vahidi, Zolghadr, Abdollahi Aliabadi, controlled the army, the intelligence services, the negotiating position, and the money.
They controlled everything.
But control in a fractured organization under existential external pressure is not the same as debility.
Because the organization Vahidi now commanded was not the IRGC of 2019.
It had been stripped of its most capable [music] leaders, penetrated by enemy intelligence at multiple levels, and divided by factional competition that [music] the removal of Khamenei’s arbiter function had allowed to become fully open conflict.
Vahidi sat at the top.
But beneath him, the structure was not a pyramid.
It was a battlefield.
And it had three fronts.
Every organization under sufficient pressure eventually reveals its true internal structure.
Not the structure shown on official charts, not the hierarchy displayed in ceremonial photographs, >> [music] >> not the chain of command described in public statements, but the real structure.
The one defined by who actually controls what.
Who answers to whom.
>> [music] >> And where the lines of loyalty and enmity actually run.
By the spring of 2026, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been under sufficient pressure for long enough that its true internal structure was becoming impossible to conceal.
What that structure revealed was not a unified military force with a coherent command hierarchy.
What it revealed was three distinct and fundamentally incompatible factions.
Each with its own strategic vision, its own resource base, its own understanding of what the IRGC existed [music] to do, and its own calculation of what survival required.
Vahidi sat nominally above all three, but nominal authority and real control are different things, and the distance between them was growing.
The first faction was Vahidi’s own.
Call them the ultra hardliners, the ideological core of the IRGC, the men who had joined the organization in its earliest years, and who had never stopped believing, with complete sincerity, in the revolutionary mission that had created it.
These were not cynics using revolutionary rhetoric to justify personal enrichment.
They were true believers, >> [music] >> men for whom the IRGC existed not as an institution serving Iranian national interests, but as an instrument of a divine historical project.
For them, the war with Israel and the United States was not a crisis to be managed.
It was a culmination.
The moment the revolution had always been building toward.
This faction controlled the organization’s most critical military assets, the missile forces, the Quds Force and its remaining proxy networks, and the Supreme National Security Council through Zolghadr’s secretariat.
Their position on every major strategic question was categorical.
No meaningful concessions on uranium enrichment.
No dissolution of the Axis of Resistance, whatever remained of it.
No negotiations that constrained the IRGC’s operational freedom.
Talks, when they occurred at all, served a single purpose.
To buy time.
Every Iranian negotiating team that sat across from American or European counterparts since March of 2026 operated under instructions written by this faction.
And those instructions [music] carried one consistent directive.
Extend, delay, and never sign anything that cannot be reversed.
The second faction was built around Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
His career is, in many ways, the biography of what the IRGC became in the decades after the revolution, and the contradictions [music] that transformation created.
During the Iran-Iraq War, Ghalibaf served as a combat pilot in the IRGC Air Force.
By 1997, he had risen to command the entire IRGC Air Force, a position he held until 2000.
During his command of the IRGC Air Force, Ghalibaf personally participated in crushing the student protests of 1999, signing a threatening letter to President Khatami alongside Soleimani and 14 other senior commanders, warning that the regime’s patience was not unlimited.
The performance earned him Khamenei’s confidence.
In 2000, the Supreme Leader appointed him chief of Iran’s law enforcement forces, a reward for loyalty >> [music] >> demonstrated when it mattered most.
Three years later, in that capacity, >> [music] >> he oversaw the suppression of the student protests of 2003.
He ran for president [music] four times.
He served as mayor of Tehran for 12 years.
In 2020, he was elected speaker of the Iranian parliament, the most senior position in the elected institutional structure of the Islamic Republic.
Ghalibaf represents what analysts call the pragmatist wing of the IRGC, the faction that moved from armed force into business and politics, that accumulated wealth and institutional influence through economic activity rather [music] than through purely military means, and that understands, at least in principle, that Iran’s long-term survival requires
something more than permanent confrontation.
This faction is not reformist.
It does not want to dismantle the IRGC’s power or return authority to civilian institutions.
What it wants is a version of stability that preserves IRGC dominance while reducing the external pressure that, left unchecked, [music] threatens to collapse the entire system.
Ghalibaf positioned himself as a potential bridge between the IRGC and the remaining civilian political structures, between Tehran and the international community, between the regime’s need to preserve its legitimacy and [music] the practical necessity of reaching some form of accommodation with the outside world.
In the negotiations conducted in Islamabad in early 2026, he was part of the Iranian delegation alongside Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi.
But those negotiations revealed something about the true balance of power that no official statement would [music] ever acknowledge.
Neither Aragchi nor Ghalibaf had the authority to conclude a deal.
Not because the terms were insufficient, not because the process was flawed, but because Vahidi had deliberately ensured that the delegation traveling to Islamabad did not carry the mandate required to make any binding commitment.
Every significant concession, every point that would have required actual Iranian movement on uranium enrichment or on the status of proxy forces, required explicit authorization from Tehran.
Authorization that did not come.
According to assessments by the Institute for the Study of War and reporting by PJ Media, Vahidi’s team monitored the Islamabad talks in real time and pulled the delegation back from any position that moved beyond what the hardliner faction had pre-authorized.
Ghalibaf was not a negotiator at that table.
He was a performance, the appearance of flexibility, deployed to manage international pressure while real policy remained entirely unchanged.
This is the architecture of the pragmatist faction’s fundamental problem.
It has political visibility.
>> [music] >> It has institutional presence.
What it does not have is control over the instruments of force.
And in the new Iran, where force is the only currency that ultimately matters, that is a fatal weakness.
The third faction has no single leader, no public face, no official designation.
Analysts who study the IRGC’s internal dynamics refer to them simply as the ghosts.
These are the mid-level officers and provincial unit commanders to whom the IRGC delegated operational authority as the senior leadership was systematically eliminated.
They received that authority not because they were selected for strategic command, but because there was no one else left.
They operated with significant tactical autonomy, a deliberate feature of the IRGC’s wartime protocols, designed to ensure that the organization could continue functioning even if its top leadership was decapitated.
The assumption behind that design was the decapitation would be partial, that enough senior leadership would survive to provide strategic direction while the autonomous units handled tactical execution.
That assumption proved catastrophically wrong.
The decapitation was nearly complete.
And what the ghosts received as a result was not tactical autonomy within a strategic framework, they received operational independence in the complete absence of any coherent strategic framework at all.
The consequences became visible in the very first week of the conflict.
IRGC units operating near the Iranian-Turkish border >> [music] >> carried out strikes that hit targets inside Turkish territory.
Turkey is a member of NATO.
Striking a NATO member state is not a tactical decision.
It is a strategic decision with potentially catastrophic [music] escalatory consequences.
One that had it been interpreted as a deliberate act of war against the alliance rather than a unilateral action by an autonomous unit could have triggered Article 5 of the NATO Charter and transformed the conflict into something categorically different in scale.
[music] No senior IRGC commander had authorized those strikes.
[music] They were executed by mid-level commanders who assessed the local tactical situation and acted without any reference to the broader strategic picture.
Ankara’s response was immediate and furious.
The incident required emergency diplomatic management at multiple levels simultaneously.
[music] And it sent a message to every intelligence service monitoring the Iranian situation that the IRGC’s command and control had degraded to a degree that no one in the Western analytical community had fully anticipated.
Inside the IRGC, the response was not a coherent accountability process.
It was a purge.
The Hedays intelligence apparatus launched an investigation.
Multiple mid-level commanders were detained.
But the investigation rapidly became something other than a search for answers.
It became [music] a factional weapon.
A mechanism through which the hardliner faction could remove officers suspected of loyalty to Ghalibaf or of insufficient ideological commitment.
Every operational failure became a pretext for elimination.
Every detained officer became a potential source of intelligence about his factional affiliations, and every purge generated new resentments among those who survived it.
Men who now understood with cold clarity that the organization they served was capable of consuming them at any moment for reasons that had nothing to do with their actual performance.
That understanding was the kindling.
And the war between the IRGC’s two intelligence structures was the match.
Inside the Islamic Republic, two separate intelligence organizations had coexisted in a state of institutional hostility since the early 1990s.
The first was the intelligence directorate of the IRGC itself.
The second was the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, known by its Persian acronym VEVAK.
The Ministry was technically a civilian institution.
In practice, it had always been deeply penetrated by IRGC loyalists.
But its institutional identity and its senior personnel had traditionally maintained at least a degree of separation from the IRGC’s direct command chain.
That separation had always generated friction.
The IRGC’s intelligence directorate regarded VEVAK as a nest of pragmatists and potential traitors.
VEVAK regarded the IRGC’s intelligence apparatus as an organization of ideological zealots who compromised operational security with their recklessness.
They competed for access to the supreme leader.
They competed for jurisdiction over sensitive cases.
They withheld intelligence from each other as a matter of institutional routine.
After February 28th, that friction became open warfare.
The trigger was the accumulated evidence that Mossad had penetrated the Iranian security apparatus at a depth and over a period of time that neither organization had detected.
Each was now blaming the other.
The IRGC’s directorate pointed to the string of assassinations and operational failures as proof that VEVAK’s culture had allowed enemy assets to operate undetected for years.
VEVAK pointed back at the Kanani case and the multiple IRGC officers arrested on espionage charges and argued that the penetration had occurred inside the IRGC itself.
Both organizations were devoting significant resources to investigating each other.
Resources that were not being devoted to detecting and neutralizing actual [music] Israeli operations.
The result was institutional paralysis at the precise moment when functional intelligence was most urgently required.
Analyst Ali Chisti, drawing on sources inside the Iranian security community, described the situation with blunt precision.
The IRGC was not hunting Mossad.
It was hunting itself.
And the deeper it hunted, [music] the more it found.
Not enemy assets, but the wreckage of its own internal collapse misread as evidence of penetration feeding a cycle of accusation and purge that made the organization simultaneously more dangerous to those inside it and less capable of responding to threats from outside.
That cycle, the purges, the resentments, the careers destroyed by internal accusation, was creating something Mossad had been preparing to exploit for years.
Not a vulnerability to be attacked from the outside, an opening [music] to be entered from within.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has always been more than a military organization.
That point has been made so often in analytical reporting that it risks becoming a cliché.
A fact acknowledged without being fully understood.
Understanding it fully requires a specific number.
300 billion dollars.
That is the estimated total value of the IRGC’s economic holdings, the vast interlocking network of companies, contracts, financial instruments, and criminal enterprises through which the organization controls between 30 and 40% of the entire Iranian economy.
Construction, oil and gas, telecommunications, banking, shipping, real estate.
The Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters alone holds infrastructure contracts worth tens of billions of dollars.
IRGC-affiliated entities control significant shares of Iran’s petrochemical industry and its import-export trade.
The organization does not merely protect the Iranian economy.
In critical sectors, it is the Iranian economy.
International sanctions had not weakened that empire.
[music] They had strengthened it.
Because sanctions do not eliminate trade, they redirect it underground through front companies, through informal networks, through the kind of deliberately opaque financial structures that large, protected organizations can build and small businesses cannot.
The IRGC had become the primary facilitator of Iran’s sanctioned economy.
The more isolated Iran became from the international financial system, the more dependent [music] the entire country became on the one organization capable of navigating that isolation.
Sanctions had turned the IRGC into a monopolist, and monopolists [music] do not share power willingly.
Then the war of 2026 broke that monopoly in ways that decades of sanctions never had.
The United States Navy’s enforcement of a maritime interdiction zone in the Persian Gulf [music] and the Gulf of Oman physically severed the sea lanes through which the bulk of the IRGC’s smuggling operations moved.
The organization’s most lucrative contraband routes, petroleum products, weapons components, and sanctioned goods moved through networks of smaller vessels operating under falsified documentation, depended on maritime access that was now
closed.
Overland alternatives existed through Iraq and Turkey, but they were slower, more expensive, and exposed to a completely different set of political complications.
Meanwhile, American and Israeli strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure had devastated the production capacity that funded everything else.
The internet blackout, which reduced Iran’s connectivity to approximately 4% of normal capacity, paralyzed the financial and logistics operations through which the IRGC managed its business interests across the region.
The generals who had spent decades dividing billions were now dividing losses.
And the mathematics of that division were destroying relationships that had survived everything else.
Because here is what the economic crisis revealed that the military crisis alone had not.
The IRGC’s factions did not merely disagree about strategy.
They competed for specific money, specific smuggling routes, specific contracts, specific financial networks that specific commanders had built over specific decades and regarded as personal domains.
When those networks operated at full capacity, competition between factions was manageable.
When the revenue collapsed, the same competition became existential.
[music] Commanders who controlled the remaining operational routes suddenly held leverage over everyone who needed access to them.
That leverage was being deployed without restraint, without institutional [music] mediation, and without any of the informal rules that had previously kept the competition within survivable limits.
This was no longer an ideological dispute.
It was a territorial war.
And its logic was not the logic of revolutionary ideology.
It was the logic [music] of organized crime.
Standing alongside this internal economic war, watching it, calculating it, waiting, >> [music] >> was an institution the IRGC had spent 47 years systematically humiliating.
The Artesh, Iran’s regular military.
The Artesh numbers approximately 350,000 soldiers.
It maintains its own ground forces, its own navy, its own air force.
On paper, a formidable military organization.
In practice, it had been deliberately and consistently [music] marginalized by the IRGC for the entirety of the Islamic Republic’s existence.
The dual military structure had been created immediately after the revolution as a deliberate safeguard.
Two armies, so that neither could move against the state without the other resisting.
But the designers of that system had built into it a permanent hierarchy.
The IRGC received better equipment, better funding, better political access, and better career [music] prospects.
The Artesh was necessary as a counterweight, but never intended to be an equal.
47 years of that treatment had produced [music] inside the Artesh officer corps something that was not loyalty, something closer to a patient, cold, and carefully suppressed fury.
By the spring of 2026, that fury was becoming harder to suppress.
The IRGC’s intelligence directorate [music] issued internal security directives in March of 2026, specifically warning of internal resistance among Artesh personnel, and threatening severe consequences for any officer who expressed [music] dissent.
The fact that such directives were necessary was itself the most revealing possible statement about the Artesh’s actual disposition.
Desertions had been recorded at multiple installations.
>> [music] >> Morale assessments described conditions in regular army units as critically degraded.
And during the street protests that erupted across Tehran and multiple provincial cities in the weeks following Khamenei’s death, protests met by the IRGC and besieged with live fire, the Artesh did not participate in the suppression.
It stood aside, quietly, without public statement or public declaration of any kind.
But the silence was heard by everyone who mattered.
The question every analyst monitoring the Iranian situation was now asking, and the question Mossad was studying with more intensity than any other single variable, was this: If the IRGC’s internal conflict escalated from political maneuvering to open confrontation, which side would the Artesh choose? Would it back the Heidis’ hardliners? Would it align with Galibov’s pragmatists, who had at least spoken the
language of institutional order? Would it remain neutral and let the IRGC factions destroy each other? Or would it see in the chaos an opportunity to reclaim the institutional standing it had been denied for nearly five decades? Nobody knew.
Not the analysts, not the Western intelligence services, and probably not even the Artesh commanders themselves.
That single, unanswerable question, sitting at the center of every scenario analysis produced by every major intelligence service in the world, was precisely where Mossad had concentrated its most [music] sophisticated, long-term attention.
Because Mossad had understood something that most Western analysts were only beginning to articulate.
The Artesh was not merely a military institution.
It was a political actor waiting for the right moment.
And the organization that understood its grievances most clearly, that had mapped its internal networks most thoroughly, that had identified which of its senior officers were most likely to move, and in which direction, would hold a decisive advantage in whatever came next.
David Barnea had become director of Mossad in 2021.
One of his first institutional decisions was the creation of a dedicated analytical unit, whose specific mandate was to map and exploit the social networks of Iran’s military and intelligence leadership.
Not public organizational charts, the actual human networks.
Who trusted whom, who resented whom, who had been passed over for a promotion that went to someone less qualified, >> [music] >> who had a relative abroad, who had savings to protect, who had been falsely accused and understood exactly what that meant for his future.
Barnea’s unit used artificial intelligence tools to process [music] decades of accumulated intelligence, signals data, human source reporting, financial monitoring, behavioral analysis, and to identify the individuals within both the IRGC and the Artesh most likely
to be receptive to approach.
That project had been operational for nearly five years when the war began.
And the war itself, with its purges, its economic collapse, its factional warfare, its atmosphere of institutionalized suspicion, had dramatically accelerated the rate at which candidates were presenting themselves.
The mechanics were not complicated.
A commander facing arrest on fabricated espionage charges has a very short window in which alternatives to surrender might be considered.
An officer whose financial networks had been destroyed by the war, who had built his position over 20 years, and watched it reduced to nothing in eight months, was not the loyal servant of the revolution he had once believed himself to be.
A mid-level intelligence professional who had watched his organization [music] purge competent colleagues while promoting ideological loyalists, and who had concluded that the organization was no longer capable of performing the mission it claimed to exist [music] for, that professional had begun, quietly and without anyone to confide in, to ask questions he had never imagined asking.
Mossad was not breaking into the IRGC from the outside.
>> [music] >> It was waiting with extraordinary patience and precise preparation for the IRGC to break itself, and collecting [music] what fell.
Which brings us to the question that every Western government, every regional power, and every intelligence service is now attempting to answer: Not what happened, what comes next? Four scenarios have emerged from the analytical work of institutions including Atalaya and the Institute for the [music] Study of War, each
representing a distinct possible trajectory for the fractured state that Iran has become.
The first, managed ceasefire.
Vahedi’s faction concludes, under sufficient accumulated economic and military pressure, that negotiated accommodation is preferable to continued conflict.
Uranium enrichment continues, but under monitoring arrangements that provide international cover.
The Strait of Hormuz reopens.
The IRGC retains domestic dominance, but accepts constraints on its external operations.
The regime survives in diminished form.
Probability, 35%.
The second, Mojtaba awakens.
The nominal supreme leader moves to assert genuine authority, drawing on the clerical networks of Qom, on elements of the Basij still loyal to the Khamenei family name [music] rather than to the IRGC command structure, and on whatever remains of the institutional religious establishment that predates IRGC dominance.
For Mojtaba to succeed, he needs generals willing to move against their own commander.
He needs to act before Vahedi understands what is happening, and he needs to survive the attempt.
Each of those conditions is improbable.
All three simultaneously are close to impossible.
Probability, 15%.
The third, permanent military junta.
Vahedi eliminates all remaining internal competitors.
Galibov’s faction is marginalized into irrelevance.
Mojtaba continues as a ceremonial figurehead with no more actual authority than a portrait [music] on a wall.
Iran consolidates as a military dictatorship with an Islamic facade, functioning less like a theocracy and more like a nuclear-armed version of a closed authoritarian state, governed by a council of generals accountable to no one.
Probability, 38%.
The fourth, fracture.
Economic collapse, sustained military failure, and the complete exhaustion of any rally-around-the-flag sentiment produce [music] something the IRGC structure cannot absorb.
Provincial commanders begin acting as independent regional powers beyond the reach of any central authority.
The Artesh refuses orders it considers suicidal or illegitimate.
Kurdish, Baluch, and Arab communities in Iran’s periphery press for autonomy that a disintegrating central government can no longer suppress.
The Islamic Republic does not fall in a single dramatic moment.
It dissolves slowly, unevenly, and with enormous human cost.
Probability 12%.
Four scenarios, one question remaining.
Which of these outcomes serves Israeli interests most effectively? The answer requires only a moment’s reflection.
Three of the four scenarios, Mojtaba’s awakening, the permanent junta, [music] and the fracture, all produce extended instability and an operational environment in which Israeli intelligence can continue working with the effectiveness it has demonstrated for years.
Only the managed ceasefire produces a stable, internationally reintegrated Iran, one in which the conditions enabling that effectiveness begin to close.
A stable Iran reconstitutes its command structure, [music] rebuilds its counterintelligence apparatus, reduces the supply of desperate, disillusioned men looking for a way out.
Chaos, by contrast, is the medium in which intelligence work functions best.
And the IRGC, through its purges, its factional warfare, its economic collapse, >> [music] >> and its institutionalized culture of suspicion, has been producing that medium in industrial [music] quantities.
The IRGC spent 47 years telling the Iranian people that it was the shield of the nation, the force standing between the Islamic Republic and its enemies, the guarantee that the revolution would endure.
What it had not told them, because it had perhaps not fully understood it itself, was what would happen when the greatest [music] threat to the organization’s survival came not from the CIA, not from Mossad, not from 200 Israeli jets crossing the border at dawn, but from the men sitting in the same room.
The supreme leader is dead.
>> [music] >> His replacement does not appear in public.
The commanders who built this organization are gone.
The men who replaced them are watching each other across conference tables, calculating distances, measuring loyalties, waiting for the move that will either save them or finish them.
And somewhere in the space between their suspicions, patient, prepared, and in no hurry at all, the world’s most effective intelligence service is waiting, too.
The question is not whether the IRGC survives this.
The question is what, if anything, survives the IRGC.
