Michael Mulroy, former US deputy assistant secretary of defence, tells Al Jazeera that although the killing of Iran’s supreme leader would mark the second regime takedown attempt by the Trump administration after Venezuela, Iran’s scenario is a “different ball game”.

“The regime in Venezuela was really held together by [President Nicolas] Maduro with some very weak underlings. In Iran, you had the supreme leader, of course, but there were multiple different power centres in the clerical establishment, the military, the IRGC and the intelligence service,” he said.

Commenting on a possible reaction by Iran, Mulroy said the country is unlikely to “comply” with US demands even after the killing of the supreme leader.

“They’re more likely, based on everything they’re saying right now, including recent statements, to escalate this and essentially turn the region into an all-out war, causing as much pain not only to the United States but also to the Gulf countries in the region,” Mulroy said.

“What they [Iran] have are drones, which is what you see striking many of these buildings in Dubai and Bahrain, for example. They can mass-produce them, and that’s how they’ve been supplying them to the Russians for years. So that’s an issue,” he said.

“Of course, they’re generally pretty easy to shoot down, but we’ve seen a lot of them get through. I don’t know if that was because they masked them, in the sense that they sent so many it was hard to deal with them all at once. That is what it sounds like in the UAE, and that is probably their biggest threat,” Mulroy said.