A detailed analysis published by Iran International — authored by Senior Analyst Morad Vaisi — documents fifty-two senior military, intelligence, security, and nuclear officials of the Islamic Republic killed in recent years, mostly in Israeli operations and in some cases with U.S. involvement. The list, spanning from Qassem Soleimani’s 2020 killing to the most recent U.S.–Israel strikes in March 2026, represents what may be the most consequential sustained leadership decapitation campaign against a major regional power in the modern era.

Together, these fifty-two figures constituted the core command network of the Islamic Republic — the men responsible for directing its armed forces, managing its intelligence apparatus, advancing its nuclear ambitions, and projecting its power across the Middle East through a vast network of proxy forces. Their elimination, Vaisi writes, offers “a revealing picture of the level of intelligence penetration, operational precision, and the sustained focus on the central nodes of power within the Islamic Republic.”

In one of the most remarkable intelligence decapitation sequences in modern history, Israel eliminated the heads of all three of Iran’s main intelligence agencies within roughly 40 days — the IRGC Intelligence Organization, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the Police Intelligence Organization.

To grasp the scale of what has occurred, Iran International’s analyst Morad Vaisi offers a direct comparison. The simultaneous killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, its Armed Forces Chief of Staff, and the heads of all three main intelligence agencies is without precedent. In a simulated equivalent scenario applied to Israel:

“Something the Islamic Republic, of course, has been unable to achieve,” Vaisi notes drily — underlining both the magnitude of what Israel and the United States have accomplished and the vast asymmetry in intelligence penetration and operational capability between the two sides of this conflict.

What the list ultimately reveals is not just a body count, but the collapse of institutional continuity at the very top of a military-security state that spent decades constructing what it believed was an impenetrable command structure, an irreplaceable proxy network, and a missile deterrent powerful enough to make it untouchable. The 12-day war and the March 2026 U.S.–Israel strikes demonstrated that each of those assumptions was wrong — and that the men who held those assumptions would not live to revise them.