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 pulverized 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 criticized Washington throughout his rule, continuing to deploy barbs after the start of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president in 2025.
