When NPR caught up with a woman named Shadi in Tehran, she was hoarse.

Last night, we screamed so hard from the windows that I don't have a voice anymore, she said.

I screamed, Hamanii is killed, she said. I was shouting from the bottom of my heart from the depths of my diaphragm.

Shadi asked not to be identified by her full name because she was worried she could be arrested by

Iran's regime for speaking to the Western media. And that gets to a complication of this moment

after the killing of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Hamanii during the U.S. Israeli

airstrike campaign.

Many people are relieved or exhilarated that the Ayatollah is dead, but the regime he led is

still very much intact.

This is not a personalized dictatorship.

This is an ideological system with a multilayered cadre.

That's Ray Taki, Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies, Council on Foreign Relations.

I think you can engage in decapitation exercises as was done in this particular strike,

but the regime is resilient enough to be able to replace depleted cadres.

And sure enough, on Sunday, barely 24 hours after Hamanai's death, a spokesperson for Iran's foreign ministry told NPR that Iran would soon have a new leader.

Here's Ismail Bagai.

The council of experts should elect the new Supreme Leader.

We hope that that would be done within the next few days, I hope.

There is no guarantee a new leader would be any better for the people of Iran than the last one,

as President Trump acknowledged in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

I guess the worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person, right?

That could happen.

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