You also have a strong personal incentive not to assassinate if it most likely leads to capture, torture, and having your entire neighborhood purged.
I think you're dramatically overestimating how easy it is to pull off a string of assassinations. Sure, you can keep attempting assassinations with force that's not capable of effective resistance in a straight military conflict, but you're likely to keep failing.
A reminder for everyone: on this day in 1983, Stanislav Petrov saved the world.
It occurs to me this time around that there's an interesting relationship here - 9/26 is forgotten, while 9/11 is remembered. Do something charitable, and not patriotic, sometime today.