Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, crushed dissent, called for Israel’s destruction

BEIRUT — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hossein Khamenei, who was killed in the US-Israeli attack on Iran on Saturday, had demonized the US, called for the destruction of Israel and maintained a steely grip on Iranian politics while in power for more than 30 years, while expanding his influence in the Middle East.

President Trump announced Khamenei’s death on Truth Social on Saturday.

As Iran’s spiritual leader and supreme authority, 85-year-old Khamenei was the final arbiter of 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 religious 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 United States and Israel. And he ruthlessly eliminated domestic challenges to his rule, including several waves of unrest across the country.

His rule has placed Tehran at the center of a sprawling network that includes friendly governments, terrorist groups and political proxies such as the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, discouraging its Arab neighbors. Despite its insistence that they are peaceful means, the pursuit of nuclear energy has unsettled the West and eventually led it to a brief war with arch-enemy Israel in 2025.

Tall, bearded and a man who might seem ordinary if not for his gruff demeanor, Khamenei owes his rise to his alliance with hardliners, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with whom he became close during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Still, he has occasionally tolerated voices of compromise, even if they were never ratified: In 2015, he reluctantly approved the landmark nuclear deal that ended Iran’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Facing an angry population and a battered economy, Khamenei said he welcomed the agreement, although he insisted that “my firm advice is not to trust the enemy,” a stance he will maintain against Washington throughout his administration.

Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 only strengthened the hand of Khamenei and other hardliners who had reservations about the agreement.

“While the Islamic Republic continues to survive, the body of this man Trump will turn to ashes and become food for worms and ants,” Khamenei said a day after Trump’s withdrawal.

That same year, Khamenei wrote on social media that Israel was a “malignant, cancerous tumor” that must be destroyed, adding ominously that “this is possible and will happen.”

Despite his fiery rhetoric, the Iranian leader almost always backed away from open warfare, even after the war. Trump orders drone strike The incident that killed Khamenei’s top enforcer, Major General Qasem Soleimani, in 2020.

In 2020, Khamenei visited the family of Major General Qasem Soleimani, shown in the portrait, who was killed in a drone strike on President Trump’s orders.

(Agency France-Presse)

While other regional autocrats, including Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gadafi, were toppled following Washington-led offensives, Khamenei feared an escalation of hostilities with the United States, Israel and Iran’s neighbors in the Persian Gulf.

This strategy served it well during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, when Iran maneuvered to gain unprecedented influence over its former foe. A 1,300-page U.S. Army history of the 2003 invasion, completed in 2018, concluded that “a bold and expansionist Iran appeared to be the sole victor.”

After October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and kidnapping approximately 250, war appeared imminent between Israel and Hamas-supporting Iran. For 20 months, Iran responded with waves of ballistic missiles but otherwise backed down, even as Israel killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and then helped topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

That changed in June when Israel struck Iran, saying it was acting to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. The Israeli attack came as Tehran and the second Trump administration returned to the negotiating table over Iran’s nuclear program.

The talks reportedly progressed before Israel eliminated Iran’s top military chain of command and leading nuclear scientists. Later, the United States joined the fight by dropping “bunker buster” bombs to infiltrate underground facilities. Iran responded with missile attacks on Israel but did not escalate the conflict.

Israeli firefighters try to extinguish a fire after a missile launched from Iran hit Tel Aviv on June 16, 2025.

(Baz Ratner / Associated Press)

Khamenei’s death marks a pivotal moment for his long-isolated country: Will his successor adopt a more moderate tone or continue indirect conflict with Washington, the West and Israel?

The Iranian Constitution states that the new leader will be elected by the Assembly of Experts, consisting of 88 clerics. Khamenei had a hand in electing most of its members, giving him significant control over who succeeded him.

One of the best candidates is Mojtaba Khamenei, the second of Khamenei’s four sons. Like his father, the 57-year-old man is a clergyman who was educated in the holy city of Qom.

Washington sanctioned him in 2019 for his work with the Quds Force, the irregular warfare arm of the Revolutionary Guard, and the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary-religious force, to “advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and repressive domestic goals,” according to the U.S. Treasury.

Whoever comes forward will have to fight against the Revolutionary Guard, which has gained power under Khamenei and has little intention of giving it up.

This uncertainty reflects the conditions once faced by Khamenei, whose rise to the top job was hardly preordained.

Born on April 19, 1939, in the city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, Khamenei was the second of eight children of jurist Seyyed Javad Khamenei and Khadija Mirdamadi.

He started religious education at the age of 4 and continued his education at a prestigious school. basina network of renowned seminaries. As a cleric in his 20s, he encountered Khomeini, a charismatic religious leader and open opponent of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

There were other influences, too: He was reportedly a voracious reader of Victor Hugo, John Steinbeck, and Leo Tolstoy. He smoked a pipe and was interested in poetry and gardening. He married Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh in 1964 and they had two daughters together with their son.

Khomeini would become his mentor, a figure to whom he would always remain loyal, and who would carry out secret missions for Khomeini while he lived in exile. Khamani paid the price for this loyalty with years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police.

According to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment who has written extensively about Khamenei, this treatment may be the root of his hatred of the United States and Israel; Both are said to provide support and training to SAVAK.

The Islamic Revolution changed Khamenei’s fate. With the overthrow of the Shah, Khomeini replaced the monarchy with an Islamic Republic, Velayat al-Faqih, in 1979. Khomeini became a religious leader and rewarded his followers with state jobs.

Demonstrators hold a poster of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during an anti-Shah protest in Tehran on December 10, 1978.

(Michel Lipchitz / Associated Press)

Khamenei was appointed to various posts: first deputy defense minister, then imam of Friday prayers in Tehran and, most importantly, chief of the Revolutionary Guard.

Two years later, in June 1981, while Khamenei was giving a religious lecture in a mosque, a recording device containing a bomb was placed next to him by the resistance group Mujahideen-i Khalq (MEK).

The explosion permanently injured Khamenei’s right arm (he reportedly greeted people with only his left hand). A few months later, another MEK bombing killed then-President Muhammad Ali Rajai along with other Iranian officials.

In the chaotic aftermath, revolutionary elites – with Khomeini’s support – asked Khamenei to run for president. He won two terms, the first with 97 percent of the votes, the second with 87 percent.

The ensuing turmoil once again benefited Khamenei in 1989. Khomeini parted ways with Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, who was designated as his heir. No one among the senior clergy was considered qualified and the idea of ​​a so-called leadership council was rejected. This left Khamenei as the best candidate, despite not being an ayatollah as required by the constitution.

At Khomeini’s insistence, the Assembly of Experts withdrew this condition, paving the way for Khamenei to succeed him. The day after Khomeini’s death in 1989, Khamenei was elected religious leader.

“My nomination should bring us all to tears of blood,” Khamenei said. “I am an individual with many flaws and flaws, and a junior seminarian indeed.”

Considered an ordinary man, lacking the charisma and religious beliefs of his predecessor, and with the country emerging from a harrowing eight-year war with Iraq, Khamenei did not at first come up with an ambitious plan for change.

Any reluctance soon gave way to a determination to restructure the economy and establish a shadow government backed by its partnership with the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij.

By 2013, Khamenei was at the nexus of an organization called the Headquarters for Executing the Imam’s Cause, estimated to have assets of around $95 billion and dealing in a dizzying array of sectors, a Reuters investigation said.

Meanwhile, he has placed the Revolutionary Guard at the center of his appointments and won the support of corps members as loyalists who see Khamenei as a shield against calls for reform.

Khamenei has used unprecedented economic and military control to quell unrest, including fuel protests in 2019 and 2022 demonstrations condemning the death of young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while in police custody.

Even in his later years, Khamenei did not soften his harsh stance towards the United States and Israel. “We will not surrender After the attacks in 2025, he said: “This is the logic of the Iranian nation.”