By SCM Foreign Desk
TEHRAN — More than three months after the devastating joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike that upended the Middle East, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has provided the first dramatic, firsthand account of the daylight raid that killed the Islamic Republic’s long-serving Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In an exclusive interview broadcast on Thursday by the Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen television network, Mr. Araghchi revealed that he did not just witness the assault from afar—he was buried alongside the country’s high command.
”At the moment of his martyrdom, I was in the office that was attacked,” Mr. Araghchi said, recounting the chaotic opening hours of the conflict on February 28, 2026. “I was emerging from the rubble.”
The strikes, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) later documented in released cockpit footage, involved a armada of 50 Israeli fighter jets dropping thirty precision-guided munitions alongside advanced air-launched ballistic missiles directly onto Khamenei’s fortified compound in central Tehran.
According to Mr. Araghchi, he had just returned from high-stakes negotiations in Geneva and was personally briefing the 86-year-old Supreme Leader on the imminent threat of war when the sky fell. Despite repeated pleas from intelligence officials to descend into a heavily reinforced subterranean shelter, Mr. Araghchi claimed that Ayatollah Khamenei stubbornly refused.
”I will not go to a shelter or to a secure location unless every member of the Iranian people also has access to a safe place,” Mr. Araghchi quoted the late leader as saying. “Whatever happens to my people will happen to me as well.”
The resulting explosions leveled major portions of the compound. While Mr. Araghchi and a small cohort in an adjacent wing survived and managed to crawl out of the dust and debris, the Supreme Leader was killed instantly.
The Foreign Minister described spending the subsequent 48 hours in complete “uncertainty” regarding the fate of the state, focusing on frantic evacuation and rescue operations while the capital burned under a wave of secondary strikes.
The revelations cast a new, chilling light on an operation that intelligence experts call one of the most audacious decapitation strikes in modern military history. Orchestrated using precise location tracking from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the attack was intentionally timed to coincide with a rare meeting of senior Iranian officials.
In his interview, Mr. Araghchi struck a defiant tone, insisting that the targeted assassination had backfired on Washington and Jerusalem. He claimed that the subsequent transition of power to the late leader’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was seamless and that “the same level of obedience and loyalty persists fully.”
However, Western intelligence assessments present a vastly different picture of a regime severely hobbled. The February 28 strike initiated a wider war that has seen Iran’s regional proxy network decimated, its air defenses dismantled, and its nuclear enrichment sites heavily damaged by U.S. and Israeli air wings.
Currently, U.S. naval forces maintain a strict maritime blockade against the country.
Even as U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu project total victory, Mr. Araghchi warned that Tehran’s lines of communication remain open but fragile. He cautioned that any expanding Israeli operations into Beirut would trigger a “full-scale resumption” of direct hostilities, proving that even from the rubble of its old leadership, Iran remains willing to gamble on total regional war.
1. The Timeline of Escalation
The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, was not an isolated incident but the climax of a rapidly accelerating conflict that began spinning out of control in 2025.
Following the collapse of back-channel nuclear negotiations in mid-2025, Israel launched preventive strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, prompting a cycle of direct missile exchanges.
The geopolitical calculus shifted entirely following the collapse of the Tehran-aligned Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, which severed Iran’s land bridge to its Levant proxies.
2. The Mechanics of the Daylight Raid
Decapitation strikes against state leaders are rarely conducted in broad daylight due to the density of urban air defenses.
The IDF’s ability to send 50 jets deep into Iranian airspace at 9:30 a.m. signaled a total breakdown of Iranian early-warning systems, which had been systematically degraded in the months prior.
The operation relied heavily on real-time cyber intelligence and satellite data provided by the CIA to pinpoint Khamenei’s exact coordinates within the compound.
3. The Domestic Backlash
While the Iranian government declared 40 days of mourning, the internal reality has been deeply fractured. Decades of economic stagnation, compounded by a brutal state crackdown in late 2025 that left over 7,000 protestors dead, meant that news of Khamenei’s death was met with public celebrations and the toppling of his statues in several Iranian cities, alongside state-mandated mourning rallies.
4. The Succession Shift
The rapid elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei to the position of Supreme Leader solidifies a hereditary transition that critics have long called a betrayal of the Islamic Republic’s original anti-monarchical foundations.
Foreign Minister Araghchi’s public messaging is heavily geared toward projecting an image of institutional continuity and stability to the outside world, masking deep-seated intra-elite rivalries currently unfolding within Tehran’s political vacuum.
To better understand the scale and precision of the operation mentioned in the article, this report detailing the air campaign offers an objective look at the strategic intelligence and military execution that defined the opening hours of the February 28 conflict.
