DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who assembled theocratic energy in Iran over the many years as its prime chief and sought to show it right into a regional powerhouse, bringing it into confrontation with Israel and america over its nuclear program whereas crushing democracy protests, has been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes. He was 86.
Iranian state media reported the demise early Sunday, after a serious assault launched by Israel and america. U.S. President Donald Trump mentioned hours earlier that Khamenei had been killed within the joint operation.
Khamenei dramatically remolded the Islamic Republic since he took the reins after the demise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Khomeini was the fiery, charismatic ideologue who led the overthrow of the shah and put in rule by Shiite Muslim clerics tasked with spreading non secular purity. It fell to Khamenei, a stodgier determine with weaker non secular credentials and a leaden demeanor, to show that revolutionary imaginative and prescient right into a state institution.
He ended up ruling far longer than Khomeini. He enormously expanded the Shiite clerical class and constructed the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard into an important physique underpinning his rule. The Guard grew to become a navy and enterprise behemoth, the nation’s most elite pressure and head of its ballistic missile arsenal, with fingers throughout Iran’s financial sectors.
However the strains grew to become more durable to comprise. Political repression and the faltering financial system fueled successively greater waves of mass protests. Anger over the 2022 demise of Mahsa Amini, detained for not sporting her obligatory headband correctly, escalated into demonstrations towards social restrictions. In early January, tons of of hundreds marched in cities throughout the nation, many chanting, “Dying to Khamenei.”
Khamenei responded with the deadliest crackdown seen in almost 50 years of clerical rule as safety forces opened hearth on crowds, killing hundreds.
On the similar time, the Mideast wars sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel set in movement the collapse of the regionwide “Axis of Resistance” constructed by Khamenei. Israel and Iran attacked one another immediately for the primary time in 2024. Israel struck Iran once more in June 2025, because it and america focused the nation’s nuclear program and killed prime navy officers and nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated by sending missiles and drones at Israel.
Khamenei’s demise raises questions on the way forward for the Islamic Republic.
The 88-seat Meeting of Specialists, a bunch of largely hard-line clerics, will select Khamenei’s substitute. However no clear successor is in place.
As he launched the bombing Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump known as on Iranians to “take over your authorities. It is going to be yours to take. This will probably be in all probability your solely probability for generations.” What occurs subsequent might rely enormously on our bodies just like the Revolutionary Guard, which has repeatedly proven its willingness to make use of overwhelming pressure to maintain energy at the same time as lots of Iran’s 90 million individuals develop disenchanted.
“Culturally, the federal government is bankrupt,” mentioned Mehdi Khalaji, an analyst on the Washington Institute for Close to East Coverage, mentioned in 2017. “The ideology of the Islamic Republic didn’t work in any respect.”
Khamenei’s daughter and son-in-law, a grandchild and a daughter-in-law additionally have been killed in Saturday’s assault, in line with the semiofficial Fars information company, citing unidentified sources.
Iran’s authorities declared 40 days of public mourning and a seven-day nationwide public vacation to commemorate Khamenei’s demise.
From a questioned begin to a hard-line grip on Iran
Ali Khamenei was born into a non secular household within the northeastern holy metropolis of Mashhad, a hotbed of revolutionary fervor in the course of the battle towards the Western-allied shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Like many different Iranian leaders, he studied underneath Khomeini on the seminary within the holy metropolis of Qom, south of Tehran, within the early Nineteen Sixties, earlier than Khomeini’s exile to Iraq and France.
Khamenei joined the anti-shah motion, dealing with time in each jail and in hiding. When Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph in February 1979 and proclaimed the Islamic Republic, Khamenei was appointed to the secretive Revolutionary Council. In 1981, he was elected Iran’s third president; that very same 12 months, a bombing by opponents left him with one hand paralyzed.
Together with his thick, heavy-framed glasses, Khamenei lacked the steely gaze and fiery aura of Khomeini, the daddy of the Islamic Revolution. He fell far wanting Khomeini’s non secular scholarship, holding the comparatively low rank of “hojatolislam” within the Shiite clerical hierarchy.
After being named supreme chief after Khomeini’s demise, he bounded in a single day to the extent of grand ayatollah, on the prime of the hierarchy, and for years needed to cope with skepticism over his credentials.
Khamenei acknowledged the doubts with humility. “I’m a person with many faults and shortcomings and really a minor seminarian,” he mentioned in his first speech in his new publish.
Regardless of his lack of charisma, Khamenei stabilized Iran after the Eighties battle with Iraq and ruled for over three many years — far longer than Khomeini.
Laborious-liners thought of him second solely to God in his authority. Khamenei created an ever-growing forms of Shiite clerics and governmental companies that blurred duties and left him as the final word arbiter. As Iran questioned whether or not to maintain the Revolutionary Guard after the battle with Iraq, Khamenei got here to its rescue and allowed the paramilitary pressure to realize a strong grip on Iran’s financial system. He additionally used a system of appointees to undercut the civilian authorities elected by its individuals.
The rise and fall of Iran’s proxy forces
Underneath Khamenei’s reign, Iran shifted totally from typical warfare to help for proxies, constructing the so-called Axis of Resistance to advance its pursuits within the area. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, established with Iran’s assist in the Eighties, drove Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000 and battled it to a stalemate within the monthlong 2006 battle.
By way of Hezbollah, Iran perfected a method of creating native militant teams its allies to undertaking energy — typically by way of violence. Iran adopted that mannequin when backing Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who in 2014 seized the nation’s capital, Sanaa, and held on for over a decade in a stalemated battle within the Arab world’s poorest nation — regardless of dealing with a Saudi-led coalition and later, U.S.-led airstrikes over their assaults within the Crimson Sea hall.
Elsewhere, suspected Iranian-backed militants bombed a Jewish heart in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 individuals. Iran additionally was allegedly linked to the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing advanced in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 members of the U.S. navy. Iran denied accountability for each assaults.
Iran emerged as a chief beneficiary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which changed its most important regional risk, Saddam Hussein, with a pleasant Shiite-led authorities. Iranian-backed militias waged a brutal insurgency towards U.S. forces and embedded themselves inside the nation’s political panorama.
Khamenei used the Guard’s expeditionary Quds Drive most efficiently after the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group seized giant swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Guard troops suggested Shiite militias, the very best fighters in Iraq, and gave essential help to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil battle.
That secured Assad for a decade, till the chaos sparked by Hamas’ assault on Israel in 2023. Israel devastated the Gaza Strip and launched airstrikes and floor operations pulverizing Hamas, which Iran had armed and funded for years. Israel is broadly believed to have killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in an operation in Tehran in 2024, additional embarrassing the Islamic Republic.
Hezbollah discovered its ranks focused by exploding pagers and an Israeli marketing campaign killed its longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah. Then, in December 2024, insurgent fighters toppled Assad in an offensive in Syria, ending a half-century of his household’s autocratic rule.
Nuclear program advances to near-weapons-grade ranges
The supreme chief remained deeply suspicious of the U.S., referring to it because the “Nice Devil” even after President Barack Obama got here into workplace in 2009, providing dialogue and a recent begin.
He shrugged off U.N. sanctions and pushed forward with Iran’s nuclear program, which the U.S. and its allies say hid a secret undertaking to construct a nuclear weapon up till 2003. Khamenei issued a verbal fatwa, or non secular ruling, that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, however vowed the nation would by no means quit its proper to develop what he known as a peaceable nuclear vitality program.
Underneath Iran’s 2015 nuclear cope with world powers, Tehran agreed to drastically scale back its stockpile and enrichment of uranium in trade for the lifting of financial sanctions. However solely three years later, Trump in his first time period unilaterally withdrew Washington from the accord, arguing it didn’t go far sufficient.
Iran has since damaged all the boundaries of the nuclear deal and gathered a stockpile of uranium enriched to almost weapons-grade ranges, now giant sufficient to pursue a number of nuclear weapons if it selected to take action. Diplomatic efforts to revive the deal underneath President Joe Biden stalled.
In a March 2011 speech, Khamenei used toppled Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who had given up his personal nuclear program years earlier, for example of why Iran’s nuclear program remained so essential within the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals within the Center East.
“Simply the best way you give a lollipop to a toddler, Westerners gave ‘incentives’ to them they usually gave up every thing,” Khamenei mentioned.
Protests and calls for for change intensified
Khamenei’s first main problem got here in 1997, when pro-reform politicians gained management of parliament and cleric Mohammad Khatami was elected president by a landslide, driving a big youth vote. The reformists demanded a loosening of the strict social guidelines imposed by the revolution and known as for improved ties with the skin world, together with the U.S.
Khamenei-backed hard-liners moved to comprise the liberal motion, fearing it will finally name for an finish to clerical rule. Khamenei stopped parliament from loosening restrictions on the media in an unusually overt intervention. Clerical our bodies blocked different key liberal laws and banned many reformist lawmakers from working for reelection, making certain a return of hard-liner management within the 2004 elections.
That set the stage for the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and his disputed reelection in 2009 amid costs of vote-rigging. Mass protests broke out, posing the best risk in many years to Iran’s clerical management. The Revolutionary Guard, Basij militia and police unleashed a crackdown through which dozens have been killed and tons of arrested.
The turmoil, and studies of protesters being tortured to demise or raped in jail, dealt a extreme blow to Khamenei’s status.
As sanctions bit additional, standard unrest rose. Financial protests broke out in 2017 and demonstrations escalated in 2019 over an increase in government-set gasoline costs. A bloody crackdown that adopted killed over 300 individuals, in line with activists.
Though Khamenei struggled to protect the ideological purity of the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s authorities has largely did not rid the nation of Western affect. Satellite tv for pc dishes, banned in principle, crowd Tehran’s rooftops. Banned social media websites are broadly used, even by some outstanding politicians, regardless of being blocked.
Protests erupted once more in 2022 over the demise of Amini, a younger lady detained for not sporting her hijab, or headband, to the liking of authorities. Greater than 500 individuals have been killed and tens of hundreds arrested when safety forces crushed the demonstrations once more.
In late December 2025, new financial protests erupted and would develop into what seemed to be the most important protest motion ever. Tons of of hundreds throughout the nation took to the streets, overtly demanding an finish to the Islamic Republic. Some even chanted for the return of the shah’s son, residing in exile since 1979. The ferocity of the crackdown surprised Iranians.
Confrontation with US
With U.S. President Donald Trump, Khamenei confronted a extra aggressive and unpredictable American drive to cease Iran’s nuclear program. Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018, bringing a return of sanctions.
The 2 sides got here near battle with america after an American drone strike killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. At Soleimani’s mass funeral that drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, Khamenei wept over the casket of the person he as soon as known as a “residing martyr.” Two days later, the Guard mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner after its takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 individuals aboard.
Iran ramped uranium enrichment again up, reaching 60% purity — a brief, technical step away from weapons-grade ranges of 90%. Nonetheless, when Trump returned to the White Home in January 2025, Khamenei resumed talks, underscoring the deep toll the sanctions had taken. Iran’s long-ailing financial system entered a freefall, worsening home unrest.
However a deal remained elusive. In June, Israel and the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear amenities, inflicting heavy harm. How far again it set this system remained unclear.
Through the crackdown on nationwide protests in January, Trump renewed threats to strike, demanding Iran make main concessions on the negotiating desk. Then got here three rounds of oblique talks. Then got here Saturday.
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Former Related Press author Brian Murphy contributed.
