Iran's revenge campaign could put Trump in its crosshairs - opinion

Since supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death, official and semi-official discourse in Tehran has merged the idea of the “martyred supreme leader” with a duty to avenge those deemed responsible for his targeting, with Trump at the top of the list.

For his part, Trump ties his personal safety directly to the fate of the Iranian regime. In multiple statements, he has said he has been “on their list for a long time,” that any successful attempt would be met with strikes against the Islamic Republic “at levels that they’ve never seen before,” and that Iran “will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before.”

Trump is working to cement a clear equation: any attack on the US commander in chief equals an attack on the very core of the Iranian regime. The prospect of assassination is not a criminal matter in this framing. It is a potential gateway to a war of an entirely different kind.

Caught between a vengeful narrative rooted in Khamenei’s blood and an American deterrence posture that treats assassination as an existential redline, a complex threat environment has taken shape.

The question is no longer whether the threat is real. It is how the threat might evolve if left unaddressed through preventive action, and how it could shift from angry rhetoric to deliberate planning and the search for means to carry out an attack.

Yet no call for vengeance, no matter how fierce, has real impact unless it finds a structure capable of turning words into action. This is where the network Tehran has built over decades comes into play.

Iran does not rely solely on a conventional intelligence apparatus or local militias. It draws on a far broader web that stretches from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies to ties with organized crime rings, drug trafficking networks, and money laundering operations.

In Latin America, the IRGC and Hezbollah have been linked to drug cartels and smuggling routes. Europe has seen repeated cases of individuals with ties to Iran accused of plotting or supporting assassination attempts and attacks on dissidents. These records reflect a readiness to exploit any legal or security vulnerability that presents itself.

Against this backdrop, finding someone to carry out an assassination does not require building a new network from scratch. It only requires redirecting an existing structure toward a specific target.

Tehran could turn to hired killers through cartels and criminal networks, purchasing ready combat expertise and using established smuggling routes to move an operative to the point of attack. The operation could be framed as a contract killing, making it hard to trace immediately back to a political decision.

The regime could also exploit foreign migrant communities in Europe and the United States. Some members of these groups live on the margins of society or harbor deep anger toward the US.

They could be pushed to carry out an attack as vengeance for a cause they see as just, or as an act of solidarity with the “martyred supreme leader.” It could also open channels to ideological extremists from fringe movements who view striking at the head of the US government as a revolutionary act against imperialism.

What multiplies the danger of these tools is the mass mobilization that accompanied Khamenei’s funeral. The event was far more than an official state ceremony. It was a sea of people chanting for vengeance, carrying portraits of the supreme leader, and blaming the West and Trump for his death.

At the height of the mourning processions, the crowd did more than carry Khamenei’s image and banners of vengeance. Regime supporters held up large posters of Trump and a list of US politicians and media figures close to Israel. Red crosshairs were printed over their faces, above an English slogan that read: “Sooner or later your heads will roll.”

This is no fleeting outburst from an unruly street crowd. It is coordinated incitement at an official state funeral. It effectively declares the killing of these individuals an open, binding duty of vengeance. It sends a signal to every network and lone actor that the path to these targets has been cleared politically and symbolically from the heart of Tehran.

In such an environment, Iran does not need to leave its fingerprints on every bullet. It is enough to supply the narrative and the symbols. Execution can be left to organized crime networks, cross-border gangs, and ideological fringe groups that crave a moment of bloody glory.

In the eyes of Iran’s security agencies, these crowds effectively become a vast recruitment pool. Anyone who attended, anyone who showed heightened fervor, anyone with ties to groups or networks, anyone living in another country falls under their watch.

With the loyalty network tied to the Guardianship of the Jurist stretching across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Africa, and Europe, the Revolutionary Guard can turn a portion of this mobilization into an active vengeance structure.

That network can provide safe havens, logistical support, help moving personnel across borders, or volunteers willing to take part in an operation abroad as an act of loyalty to Khamenei’s memory.

That is why tightening the president’s personal security is not enough. The rules of engagement with Iran’s entire vengeance apparatus must be re-engineered.

The process starts by treating any credible threat to assassinate US or Israeli leadership as a hostile act in the making. On that basis, early strikes would target the Revolutionary Guard’s planning and operational units.

The approach would continue by expanding the set of preventive targets to include the financial and smuggling networks that feed the apparatus and give it the ability to move across borders. It would be completed by building a clear alliance framework to share intelligence on these networks, maintain ready target lists, and establish public rules of engagement.

Those rules would state that simply entering the serious planning phase for an assassination carries an immediate cost, even before the first bullet is fired.

Under this logic, preventive action is not a reaction or a reckless rush forward. It is a restructuring of the rules of deterrence.

The message to Tehran, and to anyone considering performing a “service” as part of a project to avenge Khamenei’s blood, is that the threat itself has become costly.

Mere involvement in preparations from within the apparatus of the Guardianship of the Jurist or its affiliated networks is enough to trigger a painful response against that apparatus itself, not against the low-level operative who can easily be discarded.