Operation Epic Fury has already eliminated at least 48 senior Iranian officials, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Trump confirmed Sunday morning. The joint U.S.-Israeli military operation, launched Saturday, has dismantled the upper ranks of the Iranian regime in a strike campaign that moved from first sortie to decapitation in under 48 hours.
Speaking with Fox News Senior White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, Trump put the scale of the operation in plain terms:
It's moving along rapidly. Nobody can believe the success we're having, 48 leaders are gone in one shot. And it's moving along rapidly.
The Israel Defence Forces confirmed that it had killed at least 40 "key" Iranian military commanders, including Abdolrahim Mousavi, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces. According to the IDF, Mousavi was eliminated within a minute of the strike on Khamenei's compound. The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that 30 Israeli bombs were dropped on that compound alone.
Dozens of senior figures were taken off the board during the opening salvo on Saturday. Iranian state media confirmed the deaths.
According to Breitbart, Fighter jets reportedly took off from Israel at around 6 a.m. local time Saturday morning, reaching their target in Tehran at around 9:40 a.m. The Central Intelligence Agency had been tracking Khamenei's whereabouts for months prior to the strike, according to The New York Times.
The confirmed dead extend far beyond Khamenei and Mousavi. Others include:
The Israeli military issued a statement that captured the scope of what happened:
The majority of the highest-ranking senior military officials of the Iranian security leadership have been eliminated by the IDF.
That is not a boast. It is a body count of a command structure that no longer exists in any meaningful form.
The damage was not confined to Tehran. Trump said Sunday that American forces have "destroyed and sunk" nine Iranian naval ships, which he described as "relatively large and important." He wrote on Truth Social with characteristic directness:
We are going after the rest — They will soon be floating at the bottom of the sea, also! In a different attack, we largely destroyed their Naval Headquarters. Other than that, their Navy is doing very well!
The Iranian navy, such as it was, now exists in significantly reduced form. Its headquarters largely destroyed, its vessels sinking or sunk, its chain of command severed at every meaningful link.
What remains of the Iranian government is attempting to reassemble itself. An interim council government is being formed, consisting of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i, and Guardian Council jurist member Ayatollah Alireza Arafi. Pezeshkian said Sunday that the council had "started its work."
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera that there are "constitutional procedures in place" and that a successor to Khamenei could be announced within "a day or two."
Constitutional procedures. As if the constitution of a theocratic regime that has terrorized its own people for nearly five decades is the pressing concern here. The mullahcracy lost its supreme leader, its top military brass, and a significant portion of its naval power in a single weekend. Whatever governance structure emerges from the rubble will do so without the men who built and enforced the old one.
Trump framed the operation with a sense of historical weight, telling Heinrich that this situation "has been this way for 47 years." He is not wrong. Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime has been the chief exporter of terrorism in the Middle East, the primary sponsor of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and the most destabilizing force in a region that needed no help being unstable.
For decades, American foreign policy toward Iran oscillated between ineffective sanctions, catastrophic appeasement, and diplomatic theater. The Obama administration shipped pallets of cash to Tehran and called it diplomacy. The Biden administration unfroze billions in Iranian assets while the regime's proxies attacked American troops. The theory was always the same: if you give the regime enough, it will moderate. It never did. It built centrifuges instead.
Operation Epic Fury represents a fundamentally different theory of the case. Not negotiation. Not accommodation. Elimination of the leadership that made the regime what it was.
The formation of an interim council tells you something important about the state of Iran's government: the bench is thin. When your interim leadership is a president widely understood to have no real power, a chief justice, and a Guardian Council jurist, you are not projecting strength. You are scraping together whoever is still alive and credentialed enough to sit in front of a camera.
The strategic question now is whether the remnants of the regime can reconstitute anything resembling command and control over Iran's proxy networks, its remaining military assets, and its nuclear program. Every day that passes without clear leadership is a day those networks degrade further.
Trump said it plainly: 48 leaders, gone in one shot. The regime that held Iran hostage for 47 years lost its grip in less than 47 hours.