Iranian Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei Useless at 86

Khamenei by no means had the fervent following of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic, and he grew to become more and more unpopular as his rule dragged on. However after succeeding Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei managed to consolidate the nation’s distinctive cleric-led system and construct Iran into a strong adversary of america, Israel, and conservative Arab monarchies.

The longest-serving chief within the Center East till his demise, Khamenei survived quite a few private and political challenges. A 1981 bomb blast, detonated inside a tape recorder positioned on a desk earlier than him, price Khamenei the usage of his proper hand and arm, and mass protests repeatedly rattled his regime. But Khamenei outmaneuvered different Iranian leaders who had been regarded as more proficient.

Initially second in affect to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—who engineered Khamenei’s elevation to supreme chief after Khomeini’s demise and served as Iran’s president from 1989 to 1997—Khamenei eclipsed Rafsanjani by constructing stronger ties to Iran’s army and safety institution.

Below Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) grew to become a dominant drive within the financial system in addition to in international coverage. The IRGC spearheaded army operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; nurtured militias that superior Iranian pursuits; and likewise served as an instrument of home repression, suppressing actual and potential enemies.

Khamenei used the huge assets of cleric-led foundations to amass property and dispense largesse. He seeded Iranian establishments with representatives of his personal workplace, a lot in the best way the previous Soviet Communist Social gathering used native celebration secretaries and commissars to increase and keep energy. Aware of how the Soviet Union collapsed, nevertheless, Khamenei was ever on the alert for potential “Ayatollah Mikhail Gorbachevs” who would possibly reform the system from inside and open it as much as Western affect. All had been finally purged or in any other case marginalized.

Within the ultimate yr of his life, Khamenei confronted a collection of escalating challenges to his rule, from U.S. and Israeli air campaigns in June 2025 to sustained nationwide protests in January 2026. He responded with unrelenting violence, unleashing a whole lot of missiles at Israel in an try to revive deterrence and killing tens of 1000’s of his personal residents. And as the specter of a brand new warfare intensified, he refused to fulfill U.S. calls for to desert the nation’s nuclear and ballistic missile packages. Khamenei’s demise, from an airstrike at age 86, revealed the bounds of his international coverage and left the way forward for his regime in grave doubt.

Revolution was in his blood. The grandson of clerics who supported a revolt towards a earlier dynasty within the early twentieth century, Khamenei opposed the rule of former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from an early age. He was outraged by the CIA-assisted coup towards then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and was impressed as a teen by a militant Islamist, Navab Safavi, who was later executed.

Like his mentors, Khamenei espoused a worldview dominated by intense animosity towards the governments of america and Israel—each key supporters of the shah and seen as oppressing the rights of Muslims. He translated into Persian the work of Egyptian Islamic revolutionary Sayyid Qutb and demonstrated his fervent anti-Zionism by sporting a checkered Palestinian scarf round his neck. (Khamenei was additionally an enormous fan of writer Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which he described as “miraculous.”)

Khamenei studied within the Iranian Shiite heart of Qom, the place he encountered Ayatollah Khomeini at a time when Qom was turning into a middle for opposition to the monarchy. Jailed repeatedly for anti-government actions—together with collaborating in demonstrations and appearing as a courier for Khomeini tracts—he was tortured by the shah’s Mossad- and CIA-trained secret police in addition to SAVAK, Iran’s former secret police. He was additionally despatched into inner exile within the jap province of Sistan and Baluchistan. He reemerged after the 1979 revolution to imagine a collection of necessary posts, together with two phrases as president after the demise of Mohammad Ali Rajai in a terrorist bombing in 1981.

Khamenei was in a position to rise to the place of supreme chief solely after the rejection of a extra senior cleric, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who had been Khomeini’s first alternative. Khomeini revoked that call after Montazeri criticized him for authorizing the abstract execution of 5,000 political prisoners in 1988 on the finish of the Iran-Iraq Struggle.

Khamenei, who lacked Khomeini’s spiritual credentials, was “promoted” to ayatollah (“signal of God”) solely after his choice as supreme chief. As Iran’s immediately elected presidents took extra energetic and overt roles in home governance and international affairs, Khamenei solidified management quietly, increase his inner pillars of energy.

Khamenei was shocked, nevertheless, when reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami beat an institution candidate within the 1997 elections and sought to remake the Islamic Republic right into a kinder, gentler Islamic state. Khatami—who, like many Iranian reformists, had lived within the West earlier than the revolution—advocated a “dialogue amongst civilizations,” together with with america, and extra private, political, and mental freedom at house.

Khamenei, fearful that these reforms would erode clerical rule and strict Islamic social controls, responded by undercutting Khatami’s administration, authorizing the closing of newspapers and the prosecution of key Khatami officers. He additionally used brokers from the deep safety state to mount bodily assaults on high reformers.

Khamenei (left) attends the inaugural ceremony of recent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (proper) in Tehran on Aug. 3, 2005.ATTA KENARE/AFP through Getty Pictures

The police, IRGC, paramilitary Basij, and judiciary all labored collectively to crush post-election protests, often known as the Inexperienced Motion—the most important for the reason that Iranian Revolution—jailing quite a few reformists and placing opposition candidates beneath home arrest. These occasions broken Khamenei’s legitimacy. Chants of “demise to the dictator” grew to become an everyday function of anti-government demonstrations going ahead.

Whereas consistently inveighing towards america, Khamenei benefited from U.S. strategic blunders, particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He exploited U.S. overreach to extend Iran’s personal regional affect.

After the overthrow of Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein, a member of Iraq’s Sunni minority, Iran grew to become probably the most highly effective exterior actor in Iraq by organizing and bolstering Shiite political factions and militias. The Iranians additionally expanded their affect elsewhere within the area: They (together with Russia) propped up the brutal regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, helped Hezbollah develop into probably the most highly effective political and army drive in Lebanon, and cemented a stronger bond with Houthi rebels in Yemen after a bungled Saudi-led intervention there in 2015.

Khamenei could possibly be pragmatic, nevertheless. Often, he even supported tacit cooperation with america—as an example, towards the Taliban in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults and within the battle towards the Islamic State in 2014.

The Iranian chief invoked what he known as “heroic flexibility” to approve direct negotiations with america that led to a landmark nuclear settlement in 2015: the Joint Complete Plan of Motion (JCPOA). Khamenei had licensed the development of Iran’s nuclear program within the Nineties and early 2000s, insisting that Iran was not after bombs however various sources of vitality in addition to technological prowess—a declare greeted with some skepticism, notably by Israel.

Nevertheless, the choice by then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to stop the JCPOA in 2018—at a time when Iran was in full compliance—vindicated Khamenei’s lengthy mistrust of america and his view that Washington was solely looking for regime change in Iran.

Khamenei tilted towards hard-line candidates within the 2020 parliamentary elections and supported the disqualification of any believable opponent to judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi within the 2021 presidential vote. Because of this, the already flimsy democratic and republican features of the Islamic Republic shriveled up on Khamenei’s watch.

Khamenei arrives to forged his poll for the Islamic Republic’s presidential election on June 18, 2021. ATTA KENARE/AFP through Getty Pictures

Probably the most dramatic downfall was that of Rafsanjani, who sided with the Inexperienced Motion in 2009 and was prevented from operating for president once more in 2013 by a Khamenei-controlled vetting physique. Two of Rafsanjani’s youngsters have served jail phrases. Rafsanjani himself died in 2017, formally from a coronary heart assault. The household questioned the reason for demise, and a authorities investigation was launched in 2018, with out producing outcomes.

The regime additionally for a time marginalized one other once-prominent household: the Larijanis. Ali Larijani, a former speaker of parliament and nuclear negotiator, was barred from operating for president towards conservative hard-liner Raisi in 2021. To interchange these stalwarts, Khamenei promoted his personal family members, particularly his second son, Mojtaba, in addition to assorted in-laws, conservative clerics, and veterans of the Iran-Iraq Struggle. Nevertheless, Larijani was politically resurrected within the run-up to the newest U.S. and Israeli assaults on Iran and made head of Iran’s Supreme Nationwide Safety Council, sidelining the present president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

“I’m reluctant to say how sturdy the system is and the way sturdy it isn’t,” John Limbert, a former U.S. diplomat held hostage in Iran from 1979 to 1981, instructed International Coverage in early 2022. Limbert, one of many only a few People to fulfill Khamenei—he was a hostage when the then-deputy protection minister visited Limbert and his captive colleagues in 1980—stated Iranian leaders had benefited from “the incompetence of their opponents, their willingness to be brutal, and to compromise when essential.”

That was actually the method Khamenei used to cling to energy for therefore lengthy—and the method that proved unable to forestall his violent finish.