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. 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. 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.
Author: Joshua Keating
Published at: 2026-03-02 23:04:10
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