(March 1): Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran who ruled over the Islamic Republic for more than three decades, as it faced off with the West, was killed Saturday after the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Tehran. He was 86.
Iranian media on Sunday confirmed the death, saying Khamenei was killed in his office compound and that there will be 40 days of national mourning.
“This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS,” US President Donald Trump wrote in a social media post.
With Khamenei’s demise, a hugely consequential chapter in Iran’s modern history closes with little certainty over what comes next or who’s lined up to succeed him. If Iran’s state media announces his death, it will likely be followed by an official period of public mourning.
A senior member of the clergy Khamenei emerged from the religious, anti-imperialist movement that took control of the country’s 1979 revolution. With his white beard, clerical robes and black turban, he projected the image of an austere patriarch. An unsmiling figure, Khamenei never left Iran after taking office. He used his authority to suppress protests against his leadership and the Islamic system that he helped build. His unflinching response to the backlash against his views on women’s rights and civil liberties reinforced his reputation as a leader willing to kill hundreds of civilians to stay in power.
Khamenei defined Iran’s position in the Middle East as a staunch enemy of Israel and an uncompromising obstacle to US attempts to influence and shape the region. He made sure his deep-seated distrust and contempt for the US — which stemmed from Washington’s history of interference in Iranian politics and its propping up of a monarchy that had imprisoned him — was always at the forefront of Iranian political life. He repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, characterizing it as a cancerous tumor in the region.
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Commitment to jihad
Khamenei “sought relentlessly to transform the traditional Islamic concept of jihad” — a faith-based struggle against evil, as represented by the West and especially the US — “and to establish it as the central issue in the Islamist regime’s ideology,” wrote Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
While Khamenei was far from alone in his emphasis on jihad, his “novel contribution” was to make it “the grounding of the entire ideological system of the Islamic Republic and the sole basis of the Iranian regime’s statecraft,” Khalaji wrote.
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From 1989, when he succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader, Khamenei protected the interests of hard-line religious institutions and the military — often going against the grain of popular opinion, which mostly favored reform and closer ties to the West. When an uprising erupted in 2022 after a young woman died in the custody of the so-called morality police who enforced strict religious dress codes, Khamenei responded with a deadly crackdown involving both the security forces and the use of judicial executions.
The response to the recent nationwide protests that erupted on Dec 28 was even more crushing and brutal. Rights groups are still verifying the dead — so far tallied at more than 7,000 — after authorities imposed a full internet blackout on the country, throttling people’s access to the outside world during the uprising’s bloodiest weekend.
Khamenei’s impact went well beyond Iran’s borders. A self-styled global leader of Shiite Muslims, the faction of Islam dominant in Iran, he oversaw the expansion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s premier military force and an agent for its projection of power abroad. He allowed the guard — which has its own ground, air and naval divisions and plainclothes militia — to build a business empire encompassing as much as 40% of the economy. In return, its commanders gave him unflinching loyalty.
Iran built a powerful network of state and non-state allies throughout the Middle East that would fight on Iran’s behalf and act as a ring of deterrence against Israel and other US allies. As its use of these proxies expanded, Iran invited heavy criticism from Arab neighbours, many of whom decried it as dangerous interference.
Khamenei gained significant influence for Iran in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip. He did it in part by backing militias and fighting proxy battles against the US and its allies, including the Sunni Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf who helped fund Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s and later supported US sanctions on Iran’s economy.
The terrorist attacks on the US on Sept 11, 2001, brought a rare period of cooperation between Washington and Tehran over their mutual war on the Taliban. But this abruptly ended when then-US President George W. Bush later referred to Iran as part of an “axis of evil,” erasing any goodwill that had been established by the erstwhile foes.
After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought 150,000 American troops to Iran’s border, the IRGC began organising and arming Shiite militias to attack US forces in Iraq.
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In 2014, Iraq’s government formally endorsed the militias as a means of fighting the extremist Islamic State group. Khamenei also sent military reinforcements from the IRGC to help both Iraq and Syria fight IS, which was fiercely opposed to Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy. The firepower and prominence of the militias gave Iran leverage to shape Iraqi governments.
A staunch defender of Palestinians, Khamenei also provided on-and-off assistance to Hamas, the Sunni organisation that opposes Israel’s existence and controlled Gaza, from which it launched a deadly attack on southern Israel in October 2023. The crushing Israeli response fundamentally altered the power balance in the Middle East and devastated the Islamic Republic’s so-called Axis of Resistance.
Israel killed Hamas’ top leadership and thousands of its fighters, and its strikes on Lebanon crippled Hezbollah, Iran’s flagship ally. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s sudden ouster in December 2024 — just months after he was photographed meeting with Khamenei in Tehran — was the final blow to Khamenei’s Levantine alliance.
While Khamenei insisted that Iran didn’t seek atomic weapons, which he said were forbidden under Islam, he directed his country’s development of a complex nuclear programme that the West long suspected of having a military dimension. In 2015, Tehran agreed to cap its nuclear activities in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. But that international accord was scuttled three years later when Trump abandoned it in his first term.
After Israel launched a surprise attack on Tehran last year — wiping out most of the Islamic Republic’s air defenses and killing several top generals as well as hundreds of civilians — the US bombed key nuclear sites using some of the biggest ordnance in its arsenal. At the time, Trump claimed they’d been “obliterated.”
The nationwide revolt against Khamenei that erupted in December 2025 followed a slump in the national currency that made even basic goods unaffordable for much of the population. Soon it enveloped towns and cities across the country as a broad swathe of the public started calling for an end to Khamenei’s rule and his regime.
Security forces killed many thousands and arrested many more, as Khamenei declared that “rioters must be put in their place.”
Studied under Khomeini
Khamenei was born on July 17, 1939, in a one-room house in the northeastern city of Mashhad, the son of a religious scholar. At 19, he settled in Qom, the center of Shiite scholarship. There he studied under Khomeini, who later became the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader.
He joined the underground movement seeking to overthrow the US-backed monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and was repeatedly arrested and tortured. He spent three years in internal exile.
After Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran in 1979, Khamenei was appointed to lead Friday prayers in Tehran. An assassination attempt two years later crippled his right arm, but within months he became president, Iran’s top elected official.
Although always conservative, Khamenei entered politics as a pipe-smoking, soft-spoken cleric with an interest in poetry and fiction. The father of six children with his wife, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagharzadeh, he cultivated friendships with musicians and secular intellectuals.
An early test of his presidency came in 1980, when the forces of neighbouring Iraq, under Saddam Hussein and backed by the US, invaded Iran, plunging the country into a grinding eight-year war. During that span, Khamenei developed an ever-closer relationship with the Revolutionary Guard.
It was largely through the Guard that Khamenei expanded Iran’s influence abroad. The initial focus was in Lebanon, where Iran backed Hezbollah, the Shiite group formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion and subsequent military occupation of the country’s south. The Guard’s Quds Force — or international brigade — was created in 1988 to “establish popular Hezbollah cells all over the world,” as Khamenei put it.
Constitutional amendment
At the time of Khomeini’s death in June 1989, Khamenei wasn’t the obvious choice to become Iran’s next ultimate ruler. His scholarly credentials were below the level of ayatollah that the constitution demanded at the time, necessitating an amendment.
Starting in 1989 with Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iranians elected several moderate conservative and reform-minded presidents during Khamenei’s long rule. All the while, he took limited and tightly managed steps to appease burgeoning public calls for change in Iran’s cities while ensuring the mood didn’t threaten his hardline clerical rule.
Protests over alleged fraud in the 2009 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an acolyte of his, challenged Khamenei’s hold. He responded by harshly suppressing the so-called Green Movement, an experience that showed he could rule with an iron grip if he needed to. From that point on, “death to the dictator” or “death to Khamenei” were popular slogans in protests and uprisings, and the security forces became increasingly violent and brutal in their response.
In 2013, Ahmadinejad was succeeded by a relative moderate, Hassan Rouhani. It was he who, two years later, secured the deal with the US and other world powers to lift sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear program.
Khamenei grudgingly blessed the agreement, while expressing skepticism that the other parties would adhere to it. Trump’s decision in 2018 to exit the deal and reimpose sanctions vindicated Khamenei’s apprehension. It also doomed Rouhani — who had been touted by moderates as a potential successor to the supreme leader — to political purgatory.
In 2019, a sudden hike in gasoline prices provoked some of the worst violence between civilians and security forces the country had seen since the revolution at the time. Hundreds of people were killed, according to rights groups.
Hard-line conservatives took control of parliament in 2020 just as Covid-19 was taking its toll on Iran’s already struggling economy. As the pandemic was killing more people in Iran than anywhere else in the region, Khamenei announced a ban on vaccines that were manufactured by pharmaceutical firms based in the US or Europe.
The IRGC was condemned by the public in 2020 when it admitted that it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner filled with Iranian nationals in the tense aftermath of a US drone attack that killed Khamenei’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. Khamenei, in a rare sermon, defended the Revolutionary Guard, making it clear that the pain of the victims’ families and the wider public came second to his loyalty to the security apparatus that sustained him.
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