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The 36-year reign of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei transformed Iran into a formidable anti-U.S. force, expanding its military influence throughout the Middle East. His death was announced Saturday at age 86, after Israeli and U.S. airstrikes devastated his central Tehran compound. These strikes came after lengthy diplomatic efforts to resolve Iran’s nuclear dispute failed.
Initially viewed as weak and indecisive, Khamenei was an unlikely successor after the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic. Yet, his ascension to the top of Iran’s power hierarchy allowed him to wield an iron grip over national affairs. Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described him as evolving from a “weak president to an initially modest supreme leader to one of the most powerful Iranians of the last century.”
Throughout his leadership, Khamenei frequently criticized Washington, even after Donald Trump began his second term as president in 2025. Amid mass protests and Trump’s threats of intervention, Khamenei declared in January that Iran would not “yield to the enemy,” exemplifying his fiercely anti-Western stance, which he maintained since taking office in 1989.
Khamenei consistently denied Iran’s nuclear pursuits were aimed at developing atomic weapons. In 2015, he cautiously endorsed a nuclear agreement with global powers and President Hassan Rouhani that limited Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief, easing some of Iran’s isolation. However, his hostility towards the U.S intensified in 2018 when Trump’s administration withdrew from the deal and reimposed sanctions targeting Iran’s oil and shipping sectors.
After the U.S. pulled out, Khamenei supported hardline critics who opposed Rouhani’s approach of engagement with the West. In 2025, as Trump pushed for a new nuclear accord, Khamenei condemned what he called “the rude and arrogant leaders of America,” questioning their authority to decide Iran’s nuclear policies.
He frequently called the U.S. the “Great Satan” in speeches, reinforcing the deep-seated anti-American sentiment stemming from the 1979 Revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran. The regime faced significant protests in 1999 and 2002, but Khamenei’s authority was most severely tested in 2009 when disputed election results sparked widespread unrest, challenging his legitimacy.
In 2022, he responded with brutal crackdowns on protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in police custody after her arrest by morality police.
As Iran’s ultimate authority, Khamenei commanded the military and appointed key officials, including heads of the judiciary, security agencies, and the state media. He installed allies as commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guards and sought to prevent any group, even within his inner circle, from gaining enough power to challenge his anti-U.S. stance.
Born in Mashhad in April 1939, Khamenei became a cleric at age 11 and studied in Iraq and Qom. His father, an Azeri religious scholar, was a traditionalist opposed to mixing religion and politics, whereas Khamenei embraced revolutionary Islam.
He was briefly imprisoned in 1963 at age 24 for political activism and endured severe torture. After the fall of the Shah, Khamenei held several government roles, rising to prominence during the Iran-Iraq War as deputy defense minister and a key figure in the conflict’s toll of around one million lives. Known for his rhetorical skills, Khomeini appointed him as a Friday prayer leader in Tehran.
His rapid ascent raised questions, especially when he became Iran’s first cleric president supported by Khomeini, and surprisingly succeeded Khomeini himself, despite lacking widespread popular appeal or advanced clerical credentials.
Khamenei built a vast financial empire through Setad, an organization founded by Khomeini and expanded significantly under his leadership, holding assets worth tens of billions of dollars. He worked to extend Iran’s regional influence, investing billions in allies over four decades. By 2024, however, these alliances unraveled as Iran faced setbacks, including the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and military defeats inflicted by Israel on Hezbollah and Hamas, and the assassination of their leaders.
Under Khamenei, Iran and Israel engaged in a covert war, with Israel assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and Revolutionary Guard commanders. The conflict escalated openly during Israel’s 2023 offensive against Hamas in Gaza. In 2024, Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel after Israeli strikes on Tehran’s embassy in Damascus, leading Israel to retaliate.
By June 2025, Israel unleashed a massive air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear and military sites, prompting a furious missile exchange that expanded into full-scale war, with the U.S. joining in for a 12-day aerial assault. Both nations warned of further strikes if Iran advanced its nuclear or missile programs.
Recent negotiations were ongoing as of Thursday, but U.S. officials reported Iran was unwilling to halt its uranium enrichment, which Iran claimed was for peaceful purposes but others feared could lead to nuclear armament. Khamenei rejected normalized relations with the U.S., accusing Washington of supporting extremist groups to incite sectarian conflict across the region.
Throughout his tenure, he maintained that Iran’s nuclear program was non-military, even issuing a fatwa in the 1990s against developing nuclear weapons, asserting that such weapons were incompatible with Islamic principles. His death leaves a nation grappling with regional tensions, internal dissent, especially among younger Iranians, and an uncertain future amid ongoing conflict with Israel and the United States.
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