Face of the Day

Just before Iran’s supreme leader was killed in an air strike on the opening day of the war, an Iranian official dropped a clue as to who really held the power behind the scenes.

“He is one of the very few people who can still meet the leader and has been given the job of rescuing the system,” the official told the Telegraph.

The man he was talking about was Ali Larijani, Iran’s national security chief. According to Israel, Larijani is now dead, the latest of the senior leadership chain to have been assassinated – and perhaps the most important so far.

The claimed killing of Larijani is fundamentally different from the strike that killed Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. Khamenei was the head of the Iranian state, the religious authority and the constitutional commander-in-chief.

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