Iran's Supreme Leader Is Missing on Nowruz. Oil Hit $118. The IRGC Is Running Everything.

Today is Nowruz — the Persian New Year. No Nowruz message has come from Iran's Supreme Leader. No video. No statement. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard from in nearly three weeks of war, and the man who was quietly running the country in his place is now dead.

That's the situation on the morning of March 20, 2026, as the Iran conflict enters its fourth week with no off-ramp in view.

The Leadership Void Is Now Total

Ali Larijani, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and the closest thing Tehran had to a functioning wartime executive, was killed in an Israeli strike on March 17. His son and his security detail died with him. The same night, Gholamreza Soleimani — commander of the Basij, Iran's internal security force — was killed in a separate strike.

That completes a decapitation sequence that began with the assassination of Ali Khamenei at the start of the war. The chain now reads: Supreme Leader killed, his successor incapacitated and unseen, his deputy Larijani killed, his internal security chief killed. Reuters described the outcome plainly: "The killing of Iran's most influential powerbroker has pushed the Islamic Republic into a more uncertain phase, complicating decision-making in Tehran and narrowing its options as the war grinds on."

The IRGC is what's left. Iran's army chief Amir Hatami has made statements promising "decisive and regrettable" retaliation. But Hatami commands the conventional military, not the nuclear program, not the diplomatic channel, not the political legitimacy that would be needed to negotiate or accept terms. The Institute for the Study of War noted that Mojtaba Khamenei's inner circle consists of "long-standing hardline IRGC commanders" — meaning a shift toward military-only governance was already the trajectory before Larijani died.

The Nowruz silence confirms it. Every Iranian supreme leader for forty years has delivered a New Year message. The absence of one today is the clearest signal yet that the Islamic Republic's political architecture has collapsed inward.

Gulf Energy Infrastructure Under Attack

Thursday brought the sharpest economic shock since the war began. Iran launched sustained strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure, directly targeting Qatar's Ras Laffan terminal — the world's largest liquefied natural gas facility. Fires broke out at state-owned refineries in Kuwait. A drone hit a Saudi export terminal. UAE officials reported intercepting debris over gas facilities and an oil field.

Brent crude jumped nearly 10 percent to $118 a barrel on Thursday morning. European natural gas prices surged 30 percent in a single session.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business the administration was considering two options: unsanctioning the roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil already in transit, and releasing more oil from strategic reserves. Neither is a fast fix.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed Thursday that Iran's missile strikes are down 90 percent and drone attacks down 95 percent since the war began. He said the US had struck over 7,000 targets in Iran, damaging or sinking more than 120 Iranian navy ships. The Hormuz threat is diminishing by his account — but Iran's retaliation has pivoted to hitting the Gulf neighbours instead, which is a different threat to a different set of supply lines.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned European Union leaders in Brussels: "This escalation is reckless. If energy production facilities are destroyed, the impact of the war will last much longer." European markets opened down more than 2 percent. Japan's Nikkei fell 3 percent.

Chaharshanbe Suri: Fire Festival, Not Revolution

The night before Nowruz brought Chaharshanbe Suri — Iran's ancient fire festival — into the news cycle as a potential flashpoint. Opposition figures including Reza Pahlavi had called for the celebrations to become protests. The Basij commander was killed that same night.

What happened was complicated. Celebrations took place across Tehran, Rasht, and Mashhad, with large numbers of young people in the streets. PMOI resistance units claimed 15 operations against "state repression centres." But analysis from the Iranian monitoring site WANA argued that Pahlavi's call for mass protest "failed" as a political test — that the celebrations were cultural, not insurgent, and that the exiled opposition's claim of social weight wasn't borne out.

Both frames can be true. The streets were full. The regime's crackdown capacity was degraded — its internal security commander had just died. But the line between festival and uprising is determined by what happens next, not by a single night. Nowruz itself is now that next test.

The Pakistan Link

The same day Iran's army chief promised retaliation, Pakistan faced its own leadership-and-retaliation problem four thousand kilometres east. The death toll from the strike on Kabul's Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital has risen to 408 by Taliban count, with Reuters and CNN confirming the figure. The Taliban declared "no more diplomacy or talks." India condemned the strike at the UN as "cowardly, unconscionable" and called the Ramadan timing "reprehensible."

Pakistan is fighting a war it can't economically sustain with oil at $118. The Hormuz blockade was already choking fertilizer shipments — Pakistan is heavily import-dependent — and the spike from Gulf infrastructure strikes adds pressure on top of pressure. Iran was, until recently, a potential back channel: one state in the region with reasons to want both conflicts resolved quickly. With Iran's leadership structure broken, that channel no longer exists.

The two conflicts now share something structural: no one with authority to accept terms. In Tehran, the IRGC has guns but no political mandate to negotiate. In Islamabad, the civilian government is under army pressure to continue. In Kabul, the Taliban just said talks are over.

What Nowruz Tells Us

Nowruz is not simply a holiday. It is the moment when the Supreme Leader addresses the Iranian people as their leader. The fact that this is not happening — that no statement, no recording, no even heavily managed video has appeared — tells regional observers more than any battlefield report.

Iran International and Euronews both flagged this deadline days ago. The silence today means one of three things: Mojtaba Khamenei is gravely ill or dead; he is alive but so incapacitated that any public appearance would be politically damaging; or the IRGC has determined that his absence is preferable to demonstrating weakness.

In each case, the practical effect is the same. The Islamic Republic is being run by its military, prosecuting a war without a supreme leader, on Persian New Year, as oil hits $118 and the Gulf burns.

---

For regional perspectives on this conflict, see Iran coverage and the Middle East lens. The Albis Perception Gap Index tracks how this story is being framed differently across regions.