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World leaders are almost never killed in war. Why did it happen to Iran’s supreme leader?

The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could usher in a new age of assassination.

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........

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