Hosni Mubarak stood down as President on Feb. 11, 2011 after 30 years in office
State TV said Mubarak died at a Cairo hospital where he had undergone an unspecified surgery
Updated 26 February 2020
AP
CAIRO: Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian leader who for nearly 30 years was the resolute face of stability in the Mideast before being forces by the military to resign after 18-day nationwide protests that were part of the Arab world’s 2011 pro-democracy upheaval, died on Tuesday. He was 91.
Throughout his rule, he was a stalwart US ally, a bulwark against Islamic militancy and guardian of Egypt’s peace with Israel. But to the tens of thousands of young Egyptians who rallied for 18 days of unprecedented street protests in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square and elsewhere in 2011, Mubarak was a relic, a latter-day pharaoh.
They were inspired by the Tunisian revolt, and harnessed the power of social media to muster tumultuous throngs, unleashing popular anger over the graft and brutality that shadowed his rule. In the end, with millions massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and city centers around the country and even marching to the doorstep of Mubarak’s palace, the military that long nurtured him pushed him aside on Feb. 11, 2011. The generals took power, hoping to preserve what they could of the system he headed.
The state TV said Mubarak died at a Cairo hospital where he had undergone an unspecified surgery. The report said he had health complications but offered no other details.
Though Tunisia’s president fell before him, the ouster of Mubarak was the more stunning collapse in the face of the Arab Spring shaking regimes across the Arab world.
He became the only leader so far ousted in the protest wave to be imprisoned. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on Friday February 11, 2011, his deputy Omar Suleiman announced in a televised address.
He was convicted along with his former security chief on June 2012 and sentenced to life in prison for failing to prevent the killing of some 900 protesters during the 18-day who rose up against his autocratic regime in 2011. Both appealed the verdict and a higher court later cleared them in 2014.
The acquittal stunned many Egyptians, thousands of whom poured into central Cairo to show their anger against the court.
The following year, Mubarak and his two sons — wealthy businessman Alaa and Mubarak’s one-time heir apparent Gamal — sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges during a retrial. The sons were released in 2015 for time served, while Mubarak walked free in 2017.
Since his arrest in April 2011, Mubarak spent the nearly six years in jail in hospitals. Following his release, he was taken to an apartment in Cairo’s Heliopolis district.
For the man who was long untouchable — even a word of criticism against him in the media was forbidden for much of his rule — prison was a shock. When he was flown from the court to Torah Prison in Cairo in 2011, he cried in protest and refused to get out of the helicopter.
LONDON: Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed on Saturday along with much of the Iranian regime’s senior civilian and military leadership. But, thanks to Iran’s “mosaic” leadership structure, the regime itself is far from dead.
When Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died of natural causes in 1989, his successor, Khamenei, took office the very next day.
Now Khamenei is dead, killed along with dozens of members of his family and other senior Iranian leaders in a series of US and Israeli attacks on targets across Tehran. Days later, the succession question remains unanswered.
But this, experts suggest, does not mean that Iran is drifting rudderless in a power vacuum — or that cutting off the head will kill the snake.
“The Iranian regime is a system that was built to last,” said Dr Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
“It has constitutional provisions in place and deep contingency planning, with four or five names for each key role, and so there was a high level of preparedness for a leadership decapitation campaign.”
Contingencies for just such an eventuality, which were first put in place at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, “were stepped up after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Iranians assessed that there would be a long-lasting confrontation with Israel.
“And although the attacks that followed didn’t lead to a regional confrontation of the sort we are seeing now, the Iranians have been long preparing for this.”
This combination of images shows (clockwise, from top left) smoke rising from a building hit in an Iranian missile and drone attack on March 1, flames and a black plume of smoke rising from a warehouse hit in a drone strike in Sharjah, UAE on March 1, a buildijg burning in Manama Bahrain. after a drone strike, and cars destroyed during a missile barrage in n Bnei Brak, Israel, on March 3, 2026. (REUTERS plhotos)
This is what Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, specializing in international security affairs, characterized this week as “the mosaic regime.”
“Iran anticipated decapitation long before (the US operation) Epic Fury began,” he wrote on Substack.
“Under its ‘mosaic’ leadership defense doctrine, authority is dispersed into semi-autonomous cells across military, security, and political domains. Redundancy substitutes for hierarchy.”
Pape added: “Airpower kills leaders; it does not easily kill distributed function.”
This was reflected in comments from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, who said the regime had “prepared for these moments” and had “planned for all scenarios.”
Indeed, despite multiple attacks by Israel and the US on senior civilian and military leadership, the drones and missiles keep coming across the Arabian Gulf.
The Iranian state “can be best described as polymorphous,” said Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor of global thought and comparative philosophies at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Western media, he added, “has a skewed understanding of the political dynamics in Iran and there is also a political agenda behind the misrepresentations.
“The tragedy is that this false reality informs decisions. This is why we are facing this horrific war. Bad, ideological knowledge created bad, impulsive decisions.”
Within Iran, he said, “there are several institutions that compete with each other and are anchored quite firmly in networks permeating society.”
At the heart of the system is the supreme leader, who supervises the other branches of government, including elected bodies such as the presidency, the Assembly of Experts and the parliament.
“And then there are the security layers, the military (Artesh), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their underbellies — for instance the Basij units with their representation in every university, municipal council, large organizations and even the smallest villages of the country.”
In addition, “there are theological power centers in the Shiite-Islamic seminaries surrounding the holy sites in Mashhad and Qom.
“It is this polymorphic structure that explains why the Israel-US assassination campaign hasn’t disrupted the ability of Iran to govern the country, certainly for now.”
Sooner or later a new supreme leader will have to be appointed. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran lays down a precise process.
In theory, a serving leader designates his preferred successor, whose appointment after his death is subject to approval by the Assembly of Experts — a panel of 88 Islamic jurists.
The Assembly of Experts building in Qom was itself struck on Tuesday as regime clerics were gathering to elect a new supreme leader, according to local media. At the time of writing, it was not immediately clear who was inside. If confirmed, the attack is likely to delay the process further.
“I don’t know that a date has been set,” said RUSI’s Ozcelik. “I think the language being used is that it would be ‘in the near future.’
“But there will be security concerns around a physical meeting of key clerical figures that would certainly be on the radar of American and Israeli intelligence and, given the circumstances, I think the regime can continue to justify not a delay but a considered longer timeline.”
This combination of images taken from a video circulated on social media shows the damaged building of the Assembly of Experts in Qom, Iran, after it was struck. (Social media)
It remains unknown who, if anyone, Khamenei had designated as his successor. If he had not, it might fall to the Assembly of Experts to pick someone.
The field of candidates is larger than it once was. Under the original terms of the constitution, framed after the 1979 revolution, a supreme leader had to be chosen from among the pool of Grand Ayatollahs.
That changed when Ayatollah Khomeini’s original choice to succeed him, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, fell out of favor and was dropped from the succession after he began to publicly criticize some of the violent excesses of the regime.
The constitution was then amended, opening up the field of succession beyond the limited cohort of Grand Ayatollahs, which allowed Khomeini to designate Khamenei as his successor. The Assembly of Experts endorsed his choice on June 3, 1989.
In the meantime, Iran is being run, as dictated by the constitution, by a three-man council. The council, which was formed on Sunday, consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, and senior cleric Alireza Arafi.
In theory, these are the men that US President Donald Trump would be talking to should the US decide to reopen negotiations. However, Tuesday’s attack on the Presidential Office suggests no one in the regime is safe.
“I don’t know if these three are actually targets,” said Ozcelik. “Although I think that would be consistent with what we’ve seen from the Israelis’ point of view.
“But I’m not sure how helpful it would be to take out a figure such as President Pezeshkian, who in Iranian terms is a moderate, and a potential point of contact with whom Trump and his administration could have talks going forward.
“And whenever this concludes, there will need to be someone in Tehran who is able to pick up the phone when Trump calls.”
Who that might be right now is as much a question of who remains alive as anything else, said Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“I’m going to guess that the US would engage with those with whom they’ve engaged in the past, whether it’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, or possibly Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council,” she said.
“Those are, I think, the two key people I would highlight, which doesn’t necessarily overlap with that Transitional Council.”
That said, as the death toll among Iranian leaders continues to mount, it could be that no one is now safe.
“And the message that sends is one of regime change,” said Yacoubian. “That’s what the US and Israel in particular have been focused on.
“We have heard President Trump, in one of his many different interactions with various members of the media, note that the US had identified successors, and that those successors had been killed.
“I think that about sums it up, and that’s why I think that any public naming of a supreme leader may not come for some time.”
She added: “In some ways, it’s not clear how important that is at this point. I think the focus in Iran right now is very much on maintaining regime cohesion, such as it exists.
“The military and security circles have long been engaged on these questions and have been thinking through this type of scenario planning.
“So I don’t know how significant it is that we have yet to hear of a new supreme leader being named because these other centers of power, which have long existed in Iran, were likely already planning for a post-Khamenei transition well before this current conflict started, and they are clearly still acting and working, perhaps in a decentralized way.
“So yes, there have been decapitation strikes. But what that actually means in terms of how the system in Iran is operating is unclear.”
