Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei's totalitarian rule ends

Iranian official television later reported the death of the 86-year-old monarch of the last three decades, which is among the oldest in the world.

Only two supreme lords have ruled Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

As head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, including the elite Revolutionary Guards, the supreme leader has an all-powerful position.

Despite having the ability to veto any issue pertaining to public policy and personally select candidates for public office, Khamenei is not nearly a dictator since he is situated in the heart of a complicated web of rival power centers.

Iranian youth have never known life without him in command.

Every action of Khamenei has been covered by state television. His picture can be found everywhere in stores and on billboards in public areas.

Iranian leaders have frequently dominated international attention. However, Khamenei was in charge at home.

The violent circumstances surrounding his murder portend a new and unpredictable future for Iran and the wider region.

In 1939, Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, in northeastern Iran.

His father was a mid-ranking cleric from the Shia branch of Islam, which is the predominant faith in Iran. He was the second of eight children in a pious family.

Later, Khamenei would romanticize his "poor but holy" upbringing, claiming that he often just ate "bread and raisins."

The study of the Quran dominated his schooling, and by the time he was eleven years old, he was certified as a cleric. However, his work was as much political as it was spiritual, as was the case with many religious leaders of the era.

Khamenei, a gifted speaker, joined the opposition to Iran's Shah, the ruler who was ultimately deposed by the Islamic revolution.

He either festered in prison or lived underground for years. The Shah's secret police tortured and exiled him after he was detained six times.

He was named Friday prayer leader of Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution.

His weekly political sermons were televised across the nation. It solidified Khamenei's position as a member of the nation's new leadership.

A group of Khomeini-aligned violent university students took over the US embassy during the turbulent initial months following the revolution. The hostages included dozens of diplomats and embassy employees.

Khamenei and other Iranian revolutionary officials backed the students in their protests against America's decision to provide asylum to the overthrown Shah.

For 444 days, the hostages were held captive.

It contributed to the downfall of the Carter administration in the United States and led Iran along the anti-Western and anti-American trajectory that would later come to characterize the revolution.

Additionally, the incident signaled the start of Iran's decades-long international isolation.

Khamenei was fortunate to avoid assassination shortly after the incident.

A group of dissidents concealed a bomb inside a tape recorder in June 1981. He was giving a speech when it detonated.

He suffered severe injuries. His right arm was forever rendered useless, and it took months for his lungs to heal.

Following the assassination of President Mohammad-Ali Rajai later that year, Khamenei ran in the subsequent election to take over the primarily ceremonial position.

The result was always certain since Khomeini controlled who was allowed to stand. Khamenei received 97 percent of the vote.

In his inaugural speech, he denounced "deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists," setting the tone for his government.

Khamenei became a battlefield leader while in office.

Iraq, the nation's neighbor, had invaded months prior. The president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was concerned that Khomeini's Islamic revolution might spread outside and threaten his own government.

Over the course of the eight-year conflict, hundreds of thousands of people died on both sides.

Many of the officers and soldiers Khamenei encountered and knew were slain while he was on the front lines for months at a time.

The Iraqi army bombed distant towns, including Tehran, with rockets and employed chemical weapons against Iranian border villages.

Iran, on the other hand, used waves of pious children, some of whom were hardly old enough to fight, to breach Iraqi defenses. Massive numbers of people died.

Khamenei's strong mistrust of the US and the West, which had supported Saddam Hussein's invasion, was cemented by the war.

The Assembly of Experts, a council of clerics, chose Khamenei in 1989 to succeed Khomeini, who had passed away at the age of 86.

Despite what was perceived as a lackluster track record in theological studies, the new supreme head was selected.As he acknowledged in his first speech in office, "I am a person with many flaws and inadequacies and certainly a minor seminarian."But a burden has been placed on my shoulders, and I will do everything in my power and trust in God to be able to handle this enormous responsibility."

The new supreme leader moved gingerly to establish his own foundation of power because he lacked both the respect of the clergy and Khomeini's personal appeal.

However, over the course of the following three decades, Khamenei created networks of supporters throughout every branch of the Iranian government, including the media, the judiciary, the police, the parliament, and the religious elite.

A "tight-knit cartel of hardline clergymen and nouveau riche Revolutionary Guardsmen" has been essential to the supreme leader's authority, according to Karim Sadjadpour, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

In order to guarantee public devotion, Khamenei also promoted a cult of personality that was supported by political persecution and the arbitrary detention of political rivals.

He apparently lived frugally at a property in central Tehran with his wife, six children, and numerous grandkids, and he seldom ever traveled overseas.

He destroyed opposition at home.

Student protests in 1999 were dangerous, but they were put down.

Ten years later, protesters were shot, beaten, and pepper-sprayed during an uprising against a purportedly manipulated presidential election.

Khamenei blocked the internet for days in 2019 to stop unlawful marches as skyrocketing petrol costs sparked unrest in the streets. Amnesty International claims that the police then used machine gun fire to kill protesters.

He did take down the obstacles his predecessor had put in the way of women's education. However, Khamenei did not support gender equality.

Women who opposed the hijab were detained in solitary confinement, arrested, and subjected to torture. They also targeted those who backed them. One human rights attorney received 148 lashes and 38 years in prison.

In 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman accused of not wearing her hijab correctly, died in police custody, posing one of the largest obstacles to the Islamic revolution.

Human rights organizations reported that during the demonstrations that followed her death, security authorities imprisoned 20,000 people and killed over 550.

Khamenei has been generally charged with running a pariah regime abroad. President George W. Bush put Iran, along with North Korea and Iraq, in his "Axis of Evil" following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Iran has waged a semi-permanent war against Israel using Hezbollah, the armed Shia organization in Lebanon, as a Khamenei pawn.

However, despite his "Death to America" rhetoric, his foreign policy was deliberately designed to avoid both open conflict and accommodation with Washington.

Nuclear weapons were the most contentious issue.

The Khamenei issued a fatwa prohibiting their development twenty years ago after declaring them to be un-Islamic.

However, Israel and the West grew to believe under his leadership that Iran had attempted to covertly develop a nuclear weapons capability.

A nation that was once one of the largest oil exporters in the world was made poorer by the sanctions imposed by international powers in retaliation, and widespread unhappiness resulted from high unemployment.

Although Khamenei expressed skepticism about the US's long-term commitment to upholding the 2015 nuclear agreement that limited Iran's nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, he did not criticize the agreement.

Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran to force it to engage in replacement talks.

When the president ordered the death of Qasem Soleimani, a senior Revolutionary Guards general who was close to the supreme leader, in Iraq two years later, Khamenei vowed to exact retribution and sided more with China and Russia.

Iran launched a volley of missiles toward Israeli cities in June 2025 after Israeli forces assaulted the country, focusing on its nuclear program, ballistic missile arsenal, and senior military leaders.

Khamenei swore never to give up when the United States entered the war and attacked three important Iranian nuclear sites. However, he appeared weak for the first time in years.

The collapse of the Iranian economy led to a surge of street demonstrations against Khamenei's regime in January 2026. In response, it launched a violent crackdown that, according to human rights organizations, resulted in the deaths of at least 6,488 demonstrators and the incarceration of another 53,700.

Trump promised to strike Iran if it did not agree to a new nuclear program agreement and abandon its "sinister nuclear goals" and ordered a US military build-up in the region in the weeks that followed.

Khamenei, however, was unwilling to give up on uranium enrichment.

At the end of January 2026, he issued a warning: "The Americans should know that if they launch a war, this time it will be a regional conflict."

Iran's power structure has been firmly and frequently brutally controlled by Khamenei.

The supreme leader has occasionally shown himself to be practically beyond politics, mocking the arguments between Iran's conservatives and reformists. However, Ayatollah Khamenei seldom let policies he disapproved of to emerge or dissent to become too loud.

The regulations he established now regulate life in Iran. It is difficult to predict who will succeed him and, consequently, what changes might occur.