As U.S. and Israel trade blows with Iran, what’s next?

While questions are being raised about whether a regime change is possible in Iran, experts say attacks by Iran on Israel are likely to continue in the days to come.

The U.S. and Israel continue to bombard Iran following the death of its supreme leader. At the same time, Iran is firing its own missiles at surrounding Gulf States and parts of the Middle East in retaliation.

With both sides vowing to continue, people are questioning whether a wider regional conflict is possible and what could be next for Iran since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in Saturday’s attacks.

“If you don’t put boots on the ground, who does (U.S. President) Donald Trump think the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is going to hand its weapons to,” wondered Jon Allen, a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. “Regime change? Up in the air.”

On Sunday, Trump called on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and military police to lay down their arms or face death.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a prerecorded message that a new leadership council had already begun its work. The country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said a new supreme leader would be chosen in “one or two days.”

With its leader gone, experts say, the regime will aim to portray a sense of “stability and continuity,” but behind the scenes there is likely instability.

“(The regime is) going to do its best to retaliate to the degree it can, in order to do two things,” said Ross Harrison, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. “One is to show that the regime can inflict damage on its adversaries, and number two, to show that the region is still in control.

“It’s really a fight for survival of the regime and for inflicting as much damage as the regime can in order to change the calculus of its adversaries.”