Following U.S.–Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons project in the June 2025 “12-Day War,” U.S. intelligence agencies warned the American public that risk of retaliation against the United States would substantially increase “if Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets in the Homeland.”
That ruling has come to pass amid this year’s renewed hostilities, obliging the U.S. intelligence and homeland defense establishments to devise preemptive measures to protect U.S. citizens, business interests, and perhaps close allies like Israel.
On July 9, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei unveiled a top national policy priority during the Tehran funeral of his father, killed in the first renewed U.S.–Israeli airstrikes on February 28, 2026: Every instrument of Iranian state power, he declared, now serves a sacred religious duty to exact “blood vengeance” on the United States and its leaders.
Millions attending the funeral understood Khamenei had just invoked the “Ya Latharat al-Hussein” religious vengeance doctrine as regime supporters mourned under a sea of highly symbolic red flags—reflecting the doctrine’s obligation to avenge assassinated Shiite leaders. Iran’s state councils, influential regional government bodies that carry out religious policies, declared a “divine mission” and “strategic religious obligation” to attack. The regime’s Friday Prayer Policy Council has recast its weekly nationwide prayer services as “Fridays of blood vengeance and revenge” to go on until the required revenge is exacted at clerical standards.
Published originally on October 8, 2026.
Read the full report at the Heritage Foundation.
