BEIRUT — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran on Saturday, had over more than 30 years in power demonized the United States, called for the destruction of Israel and maintained an iron-clad grip on Iran’s politics while advancing its influence across the Middle East.
President Trump announced Khamenei’s death on Saturday on Truth Social.
As Iran’s spiritual leader and its highest authority, Khamenei, 85, was the ultimate arbiter in state affairs, including the economy, education and defense. He was the region’s longest-serving head of state and the second holder of the post of supreme leader in Iran.
He furthered the foreign policy of his predecessor and founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, pitting Iran against the combined military might of the U.S. and Israel. And he ruthlessly stamped out internal challenges to his rule, including several waves of countrywide unrest.
His rule placed Tehran at the center of a sprawling network that included friendly governments, terrorist groups and political proxies, such as the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and unnerved his Arab neighbors. His quest for nuclear power, despite his insistence that it was for peaceful means, agitated the West, and eventually pitted him in a brief war in 2025 with his nemesis, Israel.
A tall, bearded man who could have looked avuncular were it not for his severe mien, Khamenei owed his rise to his alliance with hard-liners, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to which he became close during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Yet he occasionally tolerated, if never 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 relief.
Facing an angry public and a battered economy, Khamenei said he welcomed the deal even as he insisted “my firm recommendation is not to trust the enemy,” a stance toward Washington he would maintain throughout his rule.
When Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, it only strengthened the hand of Khamenei and other hard-liners who harbored reservations about the pact.
“The body of this man, Trump, will turn to ashes and become the food of the worms and ants,” Khamenei said a day after Trump’s pullout, “while the Islamic Republic continues to stand.”
That same year Khamenei wrote on social media that Israel was “a malignant cancerous tumor” that had to be eradicated, adding ominously that “it is possible and it will happen.”
Despite his fiery rhetoric, the Iranian leader almost always pulled back from open war, even after Trump ordered a drone attackthat killed Khamenei’s top enforcer, Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, in 2020.
Khamenei was wary of escalating hostilities with the U.S., Israel and Iran’s Persian Gulf neighbors as other regional autocrats, including Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Kadafi, were toppled after Washington-led offensives.
The strategy served him well during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which saw Iran maneuver its way into unprecedented influence over its former adversary. A 1,300-page U.S. Army history of the 2003 invasion completed in 2018 concluded “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”
After Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas blitzed into Israel and killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped around 250 others, war between Israel and Iran — which backed Hamas — appeared imminent. For 20 months, even as Israel killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, then helped topple Syrian President Bashar Assad, Iran responded with waves of ballistic missiles but otherwise held back.
That changed in June when Israel struck Iran, saying it was acting to stop Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. The Israeli attack came just as Tehran and the second Trump administration returned to the negotiating table over Iran’s nuclear program.
The talks were reportedly progressing before Israel wiped out Iran’s top military command chain and leading nuclear scientists. Then the U.S. joined the fray, dropping “bunker buster” bombsto penetrate facilities deep underground. Iran responded with missile launches on Israel but did not escalate the conflict.
Khamenei’s death marks a pivotal moment for his long isolated nation: Will his successor tilt more moderate or continue indirect confrontation with Washington, the West and Israel?
Iran’s Constitution dictates a new leader would be selected by an Assembly of Experts, a body of 88 clerics. Khamenei had a hand in selecting most of its members, giving him significant control over who would succeed him.
One of the top contenders is the second of Khamenei’s four sons, Mojtaba Khamenei. Like his father, the 57-year-old is a cleric who studied in the sacred city of Qom.
Washington sanctioned him in 2019 for working with the Quds Force, the irregular warfare branch of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary-religious force, “to advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives,” according to the U.S. Treasury.
Whoever comes forward would have to contend with the Revolutionary Guard, which has amassed power under Khamenei and has little interest in relinquishing it.
That uncertainty mirrors the circumstances that once faced Khamenei, whose rise to the top job was hardly preordained.
Born on April 19, 1939, in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, Khamenei was the second of eight children to Sayyed Javad Khamenei, a jurist, and Khadijeh Mirdamadi.
He began his religious instruction at 4 and continued his studies at the revered hawza, a network of illustrious seminaries. As a cleric in his 20s, he encountered Khomeini, a charismatic religious leader and avowed opponent of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
There were other influences: He was reportedly a voracious reader of Victor Hugo, John Steinbeck and Leo Tolstoy. He smoked a pipe and was partial to poetry and gardening. He married Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh in 1964, and, along with their sons, they had two daughters.
Khomeini would become his mentor, a figure to whom he remained ever loyal, running secret missions for him while Khomeini lived in exile. Khameni paid for that loyalty with years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police.
According to Karim Sadjadpour, Iranian American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment who has written extensively about Khamenei, that treatment may have been the root of his loathing of the U.S. and Israel, both of which are said to have provided support and training to SAVAK.
The Islamic Revolution changed Khamenei’s fortunes. With the shah out, Khomeini replaced the monarchy in 1979 with Wilayat al-Faqih — an Islamic Republic. Khomeini became supreme leader and rewarded his devotees with government jobs.
Khamenei was appointed to several posts: first as deputy defense 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 religious lecture at a mosque, a tape recorder containing a bomb was placed near him by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a resistance group.
The explosion left Khamenei with a permanently injured right arm (he reportedly greeted people with his left hand only). A few months later, another MEK bombing killed then-President Mohammad Ali Rajai, along with other Iranian officials.
In its chaotic aftermath, revolutionary elites — with Khomeini’s backing — asked Khamenei to run for president. He went on to win two terms, the first with 97% of the vote, the second with 87%.
Disarray in succession served Khamenei once again in 1989. Khomeini had parted ways with his designated heir, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. No one else among the senior clergy was seen as qualified, and the idea of a so-called leadership council was rejected. That left Khamenei as a top candidate, even though he was not an ayatollah, as the constitution demanded.
The Assembly of Experts dropped the requirement, at Khomeini’s urging, clearing the way for Khamenei to succeed him. The day after Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was elected supreme leader.
“My nomination should make us all cry tears of blood,” Khamenei said. “I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian.”
Considered an unremarkable man, lacking the charisma and the religious bona fides of his predecessor — and with the country emerging from a bruising eight-year war with Iraq — Khamenei did not come with an ambitious plan for change at first.
Any reluctance soon gave way to a determination to remake the economy and create a shadow government — underpinned by his partnership with the Revolutionary Guard and Basij.
By 2013, a Reuters investigation said, Khamenei stood at the nexus of an organization called Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam, that was estimated to have holdings of about $95 billion and was involved in a dizzying array of industries.
Meanwhile, he placed the Revolutionary Guard at the center of his appointments, winning over corps members as loyalists who saw in Khamenei their shield against calls for reform.
Khamenei leveraged that unprecedented economic and military control to snuff out unrest, including the 2019 fuel protests and the 2022 demonstrations condemning the death of the young Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini when she was in police custody.
Even in his later years, Khamenei did not soften his vitriol at the U.S. and Israel. “We will not surrenderto any aggression,” he said after their 2025 attacks. “This is the logic behind the Iranian nation.”
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