BEIRUT — Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who was killed within the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran on Saturday, had over greater than 30 years in energy demonized america, referred to as for the destruction of Israel and maintained an iron-clad grip on Iran’s politics whereas advancing its affect throughout the Center East.
President Trump introduced Khamenei’s demise on Saturday on Reality Social. Israeli officers additionally mentioned he was killed.
As Iran’s non secular chief and its highest authority, Khamenei, 86, was the last word arbiter in state affairs, together with the financial system, training and protection. He was the area’s longest-serving head of state and the second holder of the submit of supreme chief in Iran.
He furthered the overseas coverage of his predecessor and founding father of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, pitting Iran in opposition to the mixed navy would possibly of the U.S. and Israel. And he ruthlessly stamped out inside challenges to his rule, most lately in January, when Iranians took to the streets to demand financial reforms. Hundreds have been killed by safety forces.
Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks on the anniversary of the demise of Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, proven within the portrait, at his mausoleum in Tehran on June 4, 2022.
(Workplace of the Iranian Supreme Chief / Related Press)
Khamenei’s demise would mark a pivotal second for his lengthy remoted nation: Will his successor tilt extra reasonable or proceed oblique confrontation with Washington, the West and Israel?
Iran’s Structure dictates a brand new chief could be chosen by an Meeting of Consultants, a physique of 88 clerics. Khamenei had a hand in deciding on most of its members, giving him vital management over who would succeed him.
One of many high contenders is the second of Khamenei’s 4 sons, Mojtaba Khamenei. Like his father, the 56-year-old is a cleric who studied within the sacred metropolis of Qom.
Washington sanctioned him in 2019 for working with the Quds Drive, the irregular warfare department of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary-religious power, “to advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive home goals,” in keeping with the U.S. Treasury.
Throughout his lengthy rule, Khamenei positioned Tehran on the heart of a sprawling community that included pleasant governments, terrorist teams and political proxies, such because the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and unnerved his Arab neighbors. His quest for nuclear energy, regardless of his insistence that it was for peaceable means, agitated the West, and finally pitted him in a short struggle in 2025 together with his nemesis, Israel.
A tall, bearded man who may have seemed avuncular have been it not for his extreme mien, Khamenei owed his rise to his alliance with hard-liners, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to which he turned shut through the Iran-Iraq struggle within the Nineteen Eighties.
But he often tolerated, if by no means blessed, voices for compromise: In 2015, he reluctantly endorsed the landmark nuclear deal that shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program in return for sanctions reduction.
Going through an indignant public and a battered financial system, Khamenei mentioned he welcomed the deal whilst he insisted “my agency suggestion is to not belief the enemy,” a stance towards Washington he would preserve all through his rule.
When Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, it solely strengthened the hand of Khamenei and different hard-liners who harbored reservations in regards to the pact.
“The physique of this man, Trump, will flip to ashes and develop into the meals of the worms and ants,” Khamenei mentioned a day after Trump’s pullout, “whereas the Islamic Republic continues to face.”
That very same yr Khamenei wrote on social media that Israel was “a malignant cancerous tumor” that needed to be eradicated, including ominously that “it’s doable and it’ll occur.”
Regardless of his fiery rhetoric, the Iranian chief virtually at all times pulled again from open struggle, even after Trump ordered a drone assault that killed Khamenei’s high enforcer, Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, in 2020.
In 2020, Khamenei visits the household of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, proven in portrait, who was killed in a drone assault ordered by President Trump.
(Agence France-Presse)
Khamenei was cautious of escalating hostilities with the U.S., Israel and Iran’s Persian Gulf neighbors as different regional autocrats, together with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Kadafi, have been toppled after Washington-led offensives.
The technique served him nicely through the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which noticed Iran maneuver its means into unprecedented affect over its former adversary. A 1,300-page U.S. Military historical past of the 2003 invasion accomplished in 2018 concluded “an emboldened and expansionist Iran seems to be the one victor.”
After Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas blitzed into Israel and killed about 1,200 individuals and kidnapped round 250 others, struggle between Israel and Iran — which backed Hamas — appeared imminent. For 20 months, whilst Israel killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, then helped topple Syrian President Bashar Assad, Iran responded with waves of ballistic missiles however in any other case held again.
That modified in June 2025 when Israel struck Iran, saying it was appearing to cease Tehran from creating nuclear weapons. The Israeli assault got here simply as Tehran and the second Trump administration returned to the negotiating desk over Iran’s nuclear program.
The talks have been reportedly progressing earlier than Israel worn out Iran’s high navy command chain and main nuclear scientists. Then the U.S. joined the fray, dropping “bunker buster” bombs to penetrate amenities deep underground. Iran responded with missile launches on Israel however didn’t escalate the battle.
Israeli firefighters work to extinguish a blaze after a missile launched from Iran struck Tel Aviv on June 16, 2025.
(Baz Ratner / Related Press)
Whoever comes ahead must cope with the Revolutionary Guard, which has amassed energy underneath Khamenei and has little curiosity in relinquishing it.
That uncertainty mirrors the circumstances that when confronted Khamenei, whose rise to the highest job was hardly preordained.
Born on April 19, 1939, within the northeastern Iranian metropolis of Mashhad, Khamenei was the second of eight youngsters to Sayyed Javad Khamenei, a jurist, and Khadijeh Mirdamadi.
He started his spiritual instruction at 4 and continued his research on the revered hawza, a community of illustrious seminaries. As a cleric in his 20s, he encountered Khomeini, a charismatic spiritual chief and avowed opponent of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
There have been different influences: He was reportedly a voracious reader of Victor Hugo, John Steinbeck and Leo Tolstoy. He smoked a pipe and was keen on poetry and gardening. He married Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh in 1964, and, together with their sons, they’d two daughters.
Khomeini would develop into his mentor, a determine to whom he remained ever loyal, operating secret missions for him whereas Khomeini lived in exile. Khameni paid for that loyalty with years of imprisonment and torture by the hands of the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police.
In accordance with Karim Sadjadpour, Iranian American coverage analyst on the Carnegie Endowment who has written extensively about Khamenei, that remedy might have been the foundation of his loathing of the U.S. and Israel, each of that are mentioned to have supplied assist and coaching to SAVAK.
The Islamic Revolution modified Khamenei’s fortunes. With the shah out, Khomeini changed the monarchy in 1979 with Wilayat al-Faqih — an Islamic Republic. Khomeini turned supreme chief and rewarded his devotees with authorities jobs.
Demonstrators maintain up a poster of exiled Muslim chief Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini throughout an anti-shah protest in Tehran on Dec. 10, 1978.
(Michel Lipchitz / Related Press)
Khamenei was appointed to a number of posts: first as deputy protection minister, then imam for Tehran’s Friday prayers and, crucially, a supervisor for the Revolutionary Guard.
Two years later, in June 1981, as Khamenei was giving a non secular lecture at a mosque, a tape recorder containing a bomb was positioned close to him by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a resistance group.
The explosion left Khamenei with a completely injured proper arm (he reportedly greeted individuals together with his left hand solely). A number of months later, one other MEK bombing killed then-President Mohammad Ali Rajai, together with different Iranian officers.
In its chaotic aftermath, revolutionary elites — with Khomeini’s backing — requested Khamenei to run for president. He went on to win two phrases, the primary with 97% of the vote, the second with 87%.
Disarray in succession served Khamenei as soon as once more in 1989. Khomeini had parted methods together with his designated inheritor, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. Nobody else among the many senior clergy was seen as certified, and the thought of a so-called management council was rejected. That left Khamenei as a high candidate, despite the fact that he was not an ayatollah, because the structure demanded.
The Meeting of Consultants dropped the requirement, at Khomeini’s urging, clearing the best way for Khamenei to succeed him. The day after Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was elected supreme chief.
“My nomination ought to make us all cry tears of blood,” Khamenei mentioned. “I’m a person with many faults and shortcomings and actually a minor seminarian.”
Thought-about an unremarkable man, missing the charisma and the spiritual bona fides of his predecessor — and with the nation rising from a bruising eight-year struggle with Iraq — Khamenei didn’t include an formidable plan for change at first.
Any reluctance quickly gave technique to a dedication to remake the financial system and create a shadow authorities — underpinned by his partnership with the Revolutionary Guard and Basij.
By 2013, a Reuters investigation mentioned, Khamenei stood on the nexus of a company referred to as Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam, that was estimated to have holdings of about $95 billion and was concerned in a dizzying array of industries.
In the meantime, he positioned the Revolutionary Guard on the heart of his appointments, successful over corps members as loyalists who noticed in Khamenei their protect in opposition to requires reform.
Khamenei leveraged that unprecedented financial and navy management to snuff out unrest, together with the 2019 gasoline protests and the 2022 demonstrations condemning the demise of the younger Iranian-Kurdish lady Mahsa Amini when she was in police custody.
Even in his later years, Khamenei didn’t soften his vitriol on the U.S. and Israel. “We won’t give up to any aggression,” he mentioned after their 2025 assaults. “That is the logic behind the Iranian nation.”
