Ayatollah Khamenei's iron grip on power in Iran comes to an end

 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed on the first day of massive US and Israeli air strikes on Iran, US President Donald Trump has announced.(Image: AFP/Getty Image)

The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was announced by US President Donald Trump on the first day of extensive US and Israeli air strikes on Iran. Iranian state television later confirmed the 86-year-old, one of the longest-serving rulers in history's passing. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has only had two supreme leaders. The supreme leader is head of the state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, including the elite Revolutionary Guards. This is an office with unlimited authority. Khamenei is not quite a dictator, positioned in the middle of a complex web of competing power centres, able to veto any matter of public policy and hand pick candidates for public office.

 Young Iranians have never lived without him as their leader. Khamenei's every move has been covered by state television. His picture can be found everywhere in shops and on billboards in public areas. Abroad, successive Iranian presidents have often hogged the limelight.  However, Khamenei was the one in charge at home. His violent death heralds a new and uncertain future for Iran and the region as a whole.

Many Iranians have known no other Supreme leader (Image: Getty Image)

In 1939, Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, an Iranian city in the north-eastern region. His father was a mid-ranking cleric from the Shia branch of Islam, Iran's dominant sect, and the second of eight children in a religious family. Khamenei would later romanticise his “poor but pious” childhood, saying he frequently ate nothing but “bread and raisins".

 The study of the Quran dominated his education, and by the time he was 11 years old, he was qualified as a cleric. However, like a lot of the time's religious leaders, his work was equally political and spiritual. Khamenei, a skilled orator, joined the critics of Iran's Shah, the monarch who was eventually toppled by the Islamic revolution. He lived either underground or in jail for years. He was tortured and forced into internal exile after being detained six times by the Shah's secret police.

Khamenei at prayer in Tehran after the Iranian revolution in 1979 (Image: Getty Image)

After the Islamic revolution, its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini appointed him Friday prayer leader of the capital, Tehran.

 His political sermons were broadcast across the nation each week. It made Khamenei an integral part of the country's new leadership. A group of militant university students who were devoted to Khomeini occupied the US embassy during the turbulent initial months following the revolution. The hostages included dozens of diplomats and embassy staff. Iran's revolutionary leaders - including Khamenei - supported the students, who were protesting against America's decision to give sanctuary to the deposed Shah.

 444 days were spent taking hostages. It set Iran on the anti-American and anti-Western path that would become the revolution's defining path and helped bring down the Carter administration in the United States. Additionally, the incident marked the beginning of Iran's decades-long isolation from the outside world.

American hostages being paraded by their militant Iranian captors after the US embassy was occupied (Image: Getty Image)

Khamenei was fortunate to survive an attempted assassination shortly after the crisis. A dissident group concealed a bomb inside a tape recorder in June 1981. As he gave a lecture, it exploded. He was severely hurt. His lungs took months to recover, and he permanently lost the use of his right arm.

 Later that year, President Mohammad-Ali Rajai was assassinated and Khamenei stood in the ensuing election to succeed him in the largely ceremonial role.

 The outcome was never in doubt because Khomeini controlled who could stand. With 97% of the votes cast, Khamenei prevailed. His inaugural address, in which he decried "deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists," set the tone for his presidency.

Khamenei recovers from an assassination attempt in 1981 (Image: Ayatollah Khamenei)

Khamenei became a wartime leader while in office. Iraq, the country's neighbor, had invaded months earlier. Saddam Hussein, Iraq's president, feared that Khomeini's Islamic revolution would spread abroad and undermine his own regime.

 The eight-year conflict was vicious and bloody, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. Many of the commanders and soldiers Khamenei knew and met were killed on the front lines, where he spent months at a time.

Iraqi soldiers invaded Iran in 1980 (Image: Getty Image)

The Iraqi army used chemical weapons on border villages in Iran and launched missile attacks on far-flung cities, including Tehran, the capital. Iran, on the other hand, relied on devout young people, some of whom were just out of fighting age, as human waves to break through the Iraqi lines. There were huge casualties.

 Khamenei's deep distrust of the United States and the West, which had supported Saddam Hussein's invasion, grew stronger during the war. The Assembly of Experts, a council of clerics, selected Khamenei as Khomeini's successor in 1989. Khomeini had passed away at the age of 86. The new supreme leader was chosen despite what was seen as a weak record of achievement in religious scholarship.

 In his inaugural address, he acknowledged, "I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian." "However, a responsibility has been placed on my shoulders and I will use all my capabilities and all my faith in the almighty in order to be able to bear this heavy responsibility."

 The new supreme leader took his time to build his own power base because he did not have Khomeini's personal popularity or the respect of the clergy. But, over the next 30 years, Khamenei developed networks of loyalists in every area of the Iranian establishment - including parliament, the judiciary, the police, the media, and the clerical elite.

 Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Karim Sadjadpour, claims that the supreme leader has relied on a "tight-knit cartel of hardline clergymen and nouveau riche Revolutionary Guardsmen" for power. In addition, Khamenei supported political repression and the arbitrary arrest of political opponents by encouraging a cult of personality to ensure public devotion. He reportedly lived sparingly in a compound in central Tehran with his wife, six children, and numerous grandchildren and rarely traveled abroad.

Ayatollah Khamenei relied on Iran's security and military apparatus - rather than its religious hierarchy - to cement his power (Image: Getty Image)

At home, he crushed opposition.

 The student protests of 1999 were dangerous, but they were stopped. A decade later, protesters were pepper-sprayed, beaten, and shot during a revolt against an allegedly rigged presidential election. In 2019, when skyrocketing fuel prices sparked street protests, Khamenei prevented illegal marches by blocking the internet for days. According to Amnesty International, the police then shot protesters dead with machine gun fire.

 He did get rid of the obstacles to women's education set up by his predecessor. But Khamenei was no believer in gender equality.

 Women who campaigned against the wearing of the hijab were arrested, tortured and held in solitary confinement.  Those who supported them were also targeted.  38 years in prison and 148 lashes were given to a human rights lawyer. In addition, the 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was accused of failing to properly wear her hijab, posed one of the greatest threats to the Islamic revolution. During the protests that followed her death, human rights groups claimed that security forces killed over 550 people and detained 20,000 of them. Khamenei has come under fire for leading a pariah state on a global scale. Iran was included in President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, along with Iraq and North Korea. Iran has used Hezbollah - the armed Shia group in Lebanon - as a Khamenei proxy in a semi-permanent conflict with Israel.

 However, despite the fact that he has preached "Death to America" to his people, his foreign policy was carefully designed to avoid direct confrontation with Washington or accommodation. The area of greatest friction was nuclear weapons.

 Twenty years ago, Khamenei declared that their development was against Islam and issued a fatwa prohibiting it. Under his leadership, however, Israel and the West came to believe that Iran had a covert plan to develop nuclear weapons capabilities. A nation that was once one of the largest oil exporters in the world was further impoverished as a result of the sanctions imposed in response, and the high unemployment rate contributed to widespread discontent. Khamenei did not oppose a nuclear deal agreed in 2015, which placed limits on Iran's nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief, but he expressed doubt that the US would uphold it in the long term.

Ayatollah Khamenei photographed in 2024(Image: AFP/Getty Image)

Trump ended the nuclear deal in 2018 and reinstituted sanctions against Iran to force it to negotiate a new one. After Qasem Soleimani, a top Revolutionary Guards general who was close to the supreme leader, was killed in Iraq two years later by the president, Khamenei vowing vengeance and joining Russia and China more closely. Iran launched barrages of missiles at Israeli cities in June 2025 when Israeli forces attacked the country, targeting its nuclear program, ballistic missile arsenal, and top military commanders. Khamenei vowed never to surrender when the Americans joined the war and struck three crucial Iranian nuclear facilities. However, for the first time in a long time, he appeared weak. In January 2026, Khamenei's regime faced a wave of street protests that were sparked by the failure of the Iranian economy.  It responded with a brutal crackdown, which human rights groups said left at least 6,488 protesters dead and another 53,700 in detention.

 Trump threatened to strike Iran if it did not agree to a new deal on its nuclear program and give up what he referred to as its "sinister nuclear ambitions" in the weeks that followed. However, Khamenei insisted on continuing uranium enrichment. He warned at the end of January 2026, "The Americans should know that if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war." Khamenei has kept a firm and often brutal hand on the levers of power in Iran.

 The supreme leader has sometimes appeared to be almost above politics, looking down on disagreements between reformists and conservatives in Iran. But rarely did Ayatollah Khamenei allow dissent to grow too loud or policies he disapproved off to develop.

 The laws he enacted currently govern life in Iran. Who will succeed him and what might change as a result are unknown to many.

Source: BBC

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