Trump: attacking Iran’s leadership may have been a mistake

US President Donald Trump has admitted that the strikes on Iran’s leadership may have been a mistake: Washington no longer knows who to negotiate with. According to media reports, he said so at a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

“Maybe we went too far with these leaders, because we don’t even know who the hell we’re dealing with anymore,” Trump said. According to him, “nobody wants to be president of Iran”, and potential candidates have no intention of taking the job. Masoud Pezeshkian has remained president of Iran since July 2024.

“Frankly, it’s hard for us to find someone we can make a deal with. I think we went too far,” the American leader added. In the same breath, he repeated that Iran has lost its entire air force and all 159 of its ships, which, in his words, are “resting beautifully on the bottom of the sea”.

Trump’s words came amid continuing attacks on merchant ships in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency (UKMTO) has recorded at least 19 attacks on commercial vessels there since 1 October.

Khamenei among the first killed

At the very start of the US-Israeli strikes, Iran lost its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. In the course of further attacks, the US and Israel destroyed almost the entire military and intelligence command of the country.

In July, reports emerged that the US feared Israeli plans to assassinate Iran’s chief negotiators, which could leave no one to negotiate with. Concern that Israel would derail the nascent peace talks was so strong that Washington warned Tehran, through third countries in the Middle East, of the risk of such a strike.

According to the American press, the US believed Israel was targeting Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, then key participants in the peace talks. The Americans pressed Israel to strike them from its “kill list”, where they had appeared alongside other senior Iranian officials even before the strikes began in February.

Which Iranian leaders have been killed

Among the dead: supreme leader Ali Khamenei; Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh; Chief of the General Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi; Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohammad Pakpour; Security Council secretary Ali Shamkhani and his successor Ali Larijani; head of the supreme leader’s military office Mohammad Shirazi; head of intelligence at the Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters Saleh Asadi; head of the Defense Innovation and Research Organization Hossein Jabal Ameli and his predecessor Reza Mozaffari-Nia; police intelligence chief Gholamreza Rezaian; head of planning at the General Staff Bahram Hosseini Motlagh; head of internal security service recruitment Mohammad Basseri; Basij militia commander Gholamreza Soleimani and his deputy Saeed Karimi; Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib; IRGC spokesman Ali Mohammad Naini; and IRGC Navy commander Alireza Tangsiri.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz