The piece, bylined to a "Kayhan Int'l Staff Writer" and posted to the paper's English-language site, does not merely report on recent bounty announcements targeting Trump. It celebrates them, casts the president's death as a foregone religious certainty, and extends the pool of prospective killers to nationals of multiple countries and ethnic groups, describing the "promise of paradise" for anyone who carries out the act. The Levant Files is not reproducing the language, which functions less as commentary than as an incitement to violence against a head of state.
An outlet that speaks for the top
Kayhan is not an independent voice in Iran's media landscape. Its editor-in-chief, Hossein Shariatmadari, has held the post since the 1990s as the explicit personal representative of the Supreme Leader, and outlets across the political spectrum — reformist and conservative alike — treat the paper's editorial line as a proxy for the Leader's own thinking, even when the office of the Supreme Leader periodically distances itself in public. Western governments have designated Kayhan for years over its record of antisemitic content and Holocaust denial; Canada's sanctions listing describes it as a state-controlled paper that "regularly publishes... threats against Israel, the United States and Gulf states."
That institutional position matters for how the piece should be read. It is not a fringe provocation from an obscure outlet — it is being published under the imprimatur of Iran's most powerful office, at a moment when Iran's Supreme Leader himself is dead.
The context: Khamenei's killing and an escalating call for revenge
The editorial arrives four and a half months after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on February 28, 2026, when Israeli and American strikes hit his compound in Tehran at the opening of a war between Iran and the US-Israeli coalition. Trump announced the killing personally, calling Khamenei "one of the most evil people in History" and framing it as Iran's best chance to "take back" the country. Khamenei's dayslong funeral in Tehran earlier this month drew crowds chanting "Death to America" beneath banners reading "#KillTrump."
Kayhan's editorial also folds in a second, older grievance: the January 2020 US drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC's Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces. That grievance resurfaced acutely last week, when Trump, hosting Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi at the White House on July 14, described killing Soleimani in personal terms — remarks Iraqi militia figures and officials characterized as boastful and provocative. Two days later, on July 16, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq — an umbrella coalition of Iran-aligned militias — publicly announced a $10 million bounty for Trump's assassination, saying the money would go to "whoever kills the criminal Trump" or to anyone who helps locate or facilitate an attack on him. Iranian state-aligned outlets and Telegram channels affiliated with the militias quickly amplified the bounty with posters depicting Trump in a gunman's crosshairs.
Kayhan's editorial situates itself squarely within that moment, treating the Iraqi bounty as vindication and predicting that "takers" will emerge well beyond Iran and Iraq.
A pattern, not an aberration
Explicit calls for Trump's killing have become a recurring feature of Iranian state and state-aligned messaging since Khamenei's death — from funeral banners to billboards in Tehran's Enqelab Square depicting Trump in a coffin, to the Iraqi militia bounty and its promotion on affiliated media. Kayhan's editorial adds a religious framing to that campaign, describing the killing of the American president as a foreordained certainty and holding out the prospect of paradise to whoever carries it out — rhetoric that, coming from an outlet understood to reflect the thinking of Iran's supreme religious-political authority, reads less as opinion journalism than as institutional endorsement of an assassination campaign already underway.