During his 36 years in power, Ayatollah Ali Jamenei It turned Iran into the main rival of the United States in the Middle East, extended its network of influence throughout the region and repressed with an iron fist the successive waves of protests against the theocratic regime born of the Islamic revolution of 1979.
This Saturday, at the age of 86, he died during the operation Epic Furycoordinated between Israel and the United States after diplomatic efforts to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program failed.
Saturday’s attack shattered his residence in central Tehran, Airbus satellite images captured. Along with him, his daughter, his son-in-law and his daughter-in-law died, as well as his grandchildren, according to the agency. Fars.
Initially dismissed as weak and indecisive, Khamenei seemed an unlikely choice for supreme leader following the death of the charismatic ayatollah. Ruhollah Khomeinifounder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But Khamenei’s rise to the top of the country’s power structure allowed him to exert tight control over the nation’s affairs.
Khamenei was “an accident of history” who went from being “a weak president to an initially weak supreme leader to one of the five most powerful Iranians of the last 100 years,” he told the agency. Reuters the analyst Karim Sadjadpourdel Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Ayatollah criticized Washington throughout his mandate and continued throwing darts after the start, in 2025, of the second term of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
As a new wave of protests swept through Iran, with slogans such as “Death to the dictator,” and as Trump threatened to intervene, Khamenei vowed in January that the country would not “give in to the enemy.”
By maintaining his mentor’s hard line, Khamenei thwarted the ambitions of a succession of independent-minded elected presidents who sought more open policies at home and abroad. In the process, according to his critics, he ensured Iran’s isolation.
His word was law
Khamenei long denied that Iran’s nuclear program was aimed at producing an atomic weapon, as the West maintained. In 2015 he cautiously backed a nuclear deal between world powers and the pragmatic president’s government. Hasan Rushes that limited the country’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
The arduous agreement marked a partial lifting of Iran’s economic and political isolation. But Khamenei’s hostility toward the United States did not ease but intensified in 2018, when the first Trump administration withdrew from the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions to stifle Iran’s oil and shipping industries.
After the American withdrawal, Khamenei aligned himself with the most radical supporters who criticized Rouhani’s policy of appeasement towards the West.
When Trump pressured Iran in 2025 to agree to a new nuclear deal, Khamenei condemned “the rude and arrogant leadership of the United States.” “Who are you to decide whether Iran should have enrichment?” he asked.
Khamenei often railed against “the Great Satan” in his speeches, reassuring hardliners for whom anti-American sentiment was at the heart of the 1979 revolution, which forced Iran’s last shah into exile.
Iran saw large student protests in 1999 and 2002. But Khamenei’s authority was tested most profoundly in 2009, when the disputed results of a presidential election that he had validated sparked violent street riots, fueling a crisis of legitimacy that lasted until his death.
In 2022, the supreme leader harshly repressed protesters outraged by the death of the young Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini22 years old, died in the custody of the moral police in September of that year.
Facing some of the most intense turbulence since the revolution, Khamenei blamed Western enemies and resorted to hanging protesters and displaying their bodies, hanging from cranes, after months of unrest.
The Iranians got the message.
As supreme leader, Khamenei’s word was law. He inherited enormous powers, including command of the Armed Forces and the authority to appoint numerous high-ranking figures, including the heads of the judiciary, the security services, and public radio and television.
He also appointed his allied allies as commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard, the armed wing of the regime.
As the highest authority in Iran’s complex system of clerical rule and limited democracy, Khamenei long sought to ensure that no group, even among his closest allies, gathered enough power to challenge him and his anti-American stance.
Academics outside Iran described him as a secretive ideologue, fearful of betrayal, an anxiety fueled by a 1981 bombing that paralyzed his right arm.
International organizations and activists repeatedly criticized human rights violations in Iran. Tehran claimed to have the best human rights record in the Muslim world.
Unlikely promotion
Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, in April 1939. His religious commitment became clear when he became a cleric at age 11. He studied in Iraq and in Qom, the religious capital of Iran.
His father, a religious scholar of ethnic Azeri origin, was a traditionalist cleric opposed to mixing religion and politics. In contrast, his son embraced the revolutionary Islamist cause.
“He [el padre de Jamenei] seemed like a modernizing or progressive clergyman,” he said. Mahmoud Moradkhania nephew who opposes Khamenei’s government and lives in exile. Unlike his son, “he was not part of the fundamentalists,” Moradkhani added.
In 1963, Khamenei served the first of his many prison terms when, at the age of 24, he was arrested for his political activities. Later that year he was imprisoned for ten days in Mashhad, where he suffered severe torture, according to his official biography.
After the fall of the shah, Khamenei assumed various positions in the Islamic Republic. As deputy defense minister, he became close to the Armed Forces and was a key figure in the 1980-88 war with neighboring Iraq, which left an estimated one million dead.
A skilled orator, he was appointed by Khomeini as leader of Friday prayers in Tehran.
His rapid and unprecedented rise raised questions. He won the presidency with the support of Khomeini—the first cleric to hold the office—and was a surprise choice as Khomeini’s successor, given that he lacked both the popular appeal and the superior religious credentials of his mentor.
Regional influence
His ties to the powerful Revolutionary Guard paid dividends in 2009. That year, the force crushed protests after the president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election amid accusations of electoral fraud by the opposition.
He also presided over a vast financial empire through Setad, an organization founded by Khomeini but greatly expanded under Khamenei, with assets valued in tens of billions of dollars.
Khamenei expanded Iranian influence in the region, strengthening Shiite militias in Iraq and Lebanon and propping up then-president Bashar al-Asad by deploying thousands of soldiers to Syria.
He spent billions over four decades on these allies, the so-called Axis of Resistance, which also included Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, and the Houthis of Yemen, to oppose the power of Israel and the United States in the Middle East.
But in 2024 Khamenei saw these alliances crumble and Iran’s regional influence shrink, with the overthrow of Assad and a series of defeats inflicted by Israel on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, including the assassination of its leaders.
Under Khamenei, Iran and Israel waged a shadow war for years, in which Israel assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists and Revolutionary Guard commanders.
That confrontation erupted openly during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza beginning in 2023. In April 2024, Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel after it bombed the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus. Israel responded by attacking Iranian soil.
But that was just a prelude to June 2025, when the Israeli military launched hundreds of fighter jets to attack Iranian nuclear and military targets, as well as high-ranking figures.
The surprise attack provoked an exchange of missiles in both directions, transforming a latent conflict into an open war. The United States joined the air offensive against Iran, which lasted twelve days.
The United States and Israel had warned that they would strike again if Iran continued with its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and on Saturday launched the most ambitious offensive against Iranian targets in decades.
Negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials took place as recently as Thursday, but senior U.S. officials said Iran had been unwilling to give up its ability to enrich uranium, which the Iranians argued they needed for nuclear power but which U.S. officials said would allow the country to build an atomic bomb.
On the diplomatic front, Khamenei rejected any normalization of ties with the United States. He argued that Washington had backed radical groups like the Islamic State to inflame a sectarian war in the region.
Like all Iranian officials, Khamenei denied any intention to develop nuclear weapons and went so far as to issue an Islamic ruling, or fatwa, in the mid-1990s on the “production and use” of nuclear weapons, stating: “It is contrary to our Islamic thinking.”
He also supported a fatwa issued by Khomeini in 1989, which called on Muslims to kill the writer of Indian origin. Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel satanic verses.
The late ayatollah leaves behind an Islamic Republic grappling with uncertainty amid attacks from Israel and the United States, as well as growing internal dissent, especially among younger generations.
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