By Parisa Hafezi
WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (Reuters) – The 36-year rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei built Iran into a powerful anti-U.S. force, spreading its military sway across the Middle East, while using an iron fist to crush repeated unrest at home.
He was killed on Saturday, aged 86, Iranian state media announced, in air strikes by Israel and the U.S. that pulverised his central Tehran compound, after decades of efforts to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program diplomatically failed.
At first dismissed as weak and indecisive, Khamenei seemed an unlikely choice for supreme leader after the death of the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran. But Khamenei’s rise to the pinnacle of the country’s power structure afforded him a tight grip over the nation’s affairs.
Khamenei was “an accident of history” who went from “a weak president to an initially weak supreme leader to one of the five most powerful Iranians of the last 100 years”, Karim Sadjadpour at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Reuters.
The ayatollah criticised Washington throughout his rule, continuing to deploy barbs after the start of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president in 2025.
As a new wave of protests spread through Iran, with slogans such as “Death to the dictator”, and as Trump threatened to intervene, Khamenei vowed in January that the country would not “yield to the enemy”.
The comment was typical of the ferociously anti-Western Khamenei, in office since 1989.
By maintaining the hardline stance of Khomeini, the Republic’s first supreme leader, Khamenei quashed the ambitions of a succession of independent-minded elected presidents who sought more open policies at home and abroad.
In the process, he ensured Iran’s isolation, critics say.
HIS WORD WAS LAW
Khamenei long denied that Iran’s nuclear programme was aimed at producing an atomic weapon, as the West contended. In 2015 he cautiously supported a nuclear deal between world powers and the government of pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani that curbed the country’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. The hard-won accord resulted in a partial lifting of Iran’s economic and political isolation.
But Khamenei’s hostility toward the U.S. was undimmed, intensifying in 2018 when Trump’s first administration withdrew from the nuclear agreement and reimposed sanctions to choke Iran’s oil and shipping industries.
Following the U.S. withdrawal, Khamenei sided with hardline supporters who criticised Rouhani’s policy of appeasement towards the West.
As Trump pressed Iran to agree to a new nuclear deal in 2025, Khamenei condemned “the rude and arrogant leaders of America”. “Who are you to decide whether Iran should have enrichment?” he asked.
Khamenei often denounced “the Great Satan” in speeches, reassuring hardliners for whom anti-U.S. sentiment was at the heart of the 1979 revolution, which forced the last shah of Iran into exile.
Iran saw major student-led protests in 1999 and 2002. But Khamenei’s authority was put to the test more profoundly in 2009, when the contested results of a presidential election that he had validated ignited violent street unrest, stoking a crisis of legitimacy that lingered until his death.
In 2022, Khamenei cracked down on protesters enraged by the death of Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, 22, who died in the custody of morality police in September of that year.
Faced with some of the most intense turmoil since the revolution, Khamenei blamed Western enemies then resorted to the hanging of protesters and the display of their bodies, suspended from cranes, after months of unrest.
Iranians got the message.
As supreme leader, Khamenei’s word was law. He inherited enormous powers, including command of the armed forces and the authority to appoint many senior figures, among them the heads of the judiciary, security agencies and state radio and television.
He appointed allies as commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
As the final authority in Iran’s complex system of clerical rule and limited democracy, Khamenei long sought to ensure that no group, even among his closest allies, mustered enough power to challenge him and his anti-U.S. stance.
Scholars outside Iran painted a picture of a secretive ideologue fearful of betrayal – an anxiety fuelled by an assassination attempt in 1981 that paralysed his right arm.
International organisations and activists repeatedly criticised violations of human rights in Iran. Tehran said it has the best human rights record in the Muslim world.
AN UNLIKELY RISE TO POWER
Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, northeast Iran, in April 1939. His religious commitment was clear when he became a cleric at the age of 11. He studied in Iraq and in Qom, Iran’s religious capital.
His father, a religious scholar of ethnic Azeri descent, was a traditionalist cleric opposed to mixing religion and politics. In contrast, his son embraced the Islamist revolutionary cause.
“He (Khamenei’s father) came across as a modernist or progressive cleric,” said Mahmoud Moradkhani, a nephew who opposes Khamenei’s rule and lives in exile. Unlike his son, “he was not a part of the fundamentalists”, Moradkhani said.
In 1963, Khamenei served the first of many terms in prison when at 24 he was detained for political activities. Later that year he was imprisoned for 10 days in Mashhad, where he underwent severe torture, according to his official biography.
After the shah’s fall, Khamenei took up several posts in the Islamic Republic. As deputy minister of defence, he became close to the military and was a key figure in the 1980-88 war with neighbouring Iraq, which claimed an estimated total of one million lives.
A skilled orator, he was appointed by Khomeini as a Friday prayer leader in Tehran.
There were questions about his rapid, unprecedented rise. He won the presidency with Khomeini’s support – the first cleric in the post – and was a surprise choice as Khomeini’s successor, given that he lacked both Khomeini’s popular appeal and superior clerical credentials.
EXPANDING IRAN’S INFLUENCE
His ties to the powerful Guards paid off in 2009. That year, the force crushed protests after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election amid opposition accusations of vote fraud.
He also presided over a vast financial empire through Setad, an organisation founded by Khomeini but expanded hugely under Khamenei, with assets worth tens of billions of dollars.
Khamenei expanded Iranian influence in the region, empowering Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Lebanon, and propping up then-President Bashar al-Assad by deploying thousands of soldiers to Syria.
He spent billions over four decades on these allies – the “Axis of Resistance”, which also included Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, and Yemen’s Houthis – to oppose Israeli and U.S. power in the Middle East.
But in 2024 Khamenei saw these alliances unravel, and Iran’s regional influence shrivel, with the ousting of Assad and a series of defeats inflicted by Israel on Hezbollah in Lebanon and on Hamas in Gaza, including the killing of their leaders.
Under Khamenei’s rule, Iran and Israel fought a shadow war for years, with Israel assassinating Tehran’s nuclear scientists and Revolutionary Guard commanders.
It exploded into the open during Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza from 2023. In April 2024, Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel after it bombed Tehran’s embassy compound in Damascus. Israel struck Iranian soil in response.
But that was only a prelude to June 2025, when Israel’s military unleashed hundreds of fighter jets to strike Iranian nuclear and military targets as well as senior personnel. The surprise attack provoked a barrage of missiles in both directions, transforming simmering conflict into all-out war. The U.S. joined the air offensive on Iran, which lasted 12 days.
The U.S. and Israel had warned they would strike again if Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and, on Saturday, they launched the most ambitious attack on Iranian targets in decades.
Negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials took place as recently as Thursday, but senior U.S. officials said that Iran had not been willing to give up its ability to enrich uranium, which the Iranians argued they wanted for nuclear energy but U.S. officials said would enable the country to build a nuclear bomb.
On the diplomatic front, Khamenei rejected any normalisation of ties with the United States. He argued that Washington had backed hardline groups like Islamic State to inflame a sectarian war in the region.
Like all Iranian officials, Khamenei denied any intent to develop nuclear weapons and went so far as to issue an Islamic ruling, or fatwa, in the mid-1990s on “production and usage” of nuclear weapons, saying: “It is against our Islamic thoughts.”
He also supported a fatwa issued by Khomeini in 1989, which called on Muslims to kill the Indian-born author Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses”.
Khamenei’s official website confirmed the ongoing validity of the death edict as recently as 2017. Five years later, Rushdie was stabbed while giving a public lecture in New York. The writer was gravely wounded, but survived. The perpetrator, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2025 for attempted murder, did not testify at the trial.
The late ayatollah leaves an Islamic Republic wrestling with uncertainty amid the attacks from Israel and the United States, as well as growing dissent at home, especially among younger generations.
“I just want to live a peaceful, normal life … Instead, they (the rulers) insist on a nuclear programme, supporting armed groups in the region, and maintaining hostility toward the United States,” Mina, 25, told Reuters by phone from Kuhdasht in the western Lorestan province at the start of 2026.
“Those policies may have made sense in 1979, but not today,” the jobless university graduate added. “The world has changed.”
(Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Olivier Holmey, Michael Georgy, William Maclean, Janet Lawrence and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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