DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who assembled theocratic energy in Iran over the many years as its top leader and sought to turn it into a regional powerhouse, bringing it into confrontation with Israel and the US over its nuclear program while crushing democracy protests, has been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes. He became as soon as 86.
Iranian assert media reported the demise early Sunday, after a main assault launched by Israel and the US. U.S. President Donald Trump mentioned hours earlier that Khamenei had been killed in the joint operation.
Khamenei dramatically remolded the Islamic Republic since he took the reins after the demise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Khomeini became as soon as the fiery, charismatic ideologue who led the overthrow of the shah and installed rule by Shiite Muslim clerics tasked with spreading spiritual purity. It fell to Khamenei, a stodgier determine with weaker spiritual credentials and a leaden demeanor, to turn that revolutionary vision into a assert establishment.
He ended up ruling a long way longer than Khomeini. He drastically expanded the Shiite clerical class and built the paramilitary Innovative Guard into the supreme body underpinning his rule. The Guard turned a protection force and business behemoth, the country’s most elite force and head of its ballistic missile arsenal, with fingers at some point of Iran’s economic sectors.
Nevertheless the strains turned tougher to contain. Political repression and the faltering financial system fueled successively better waves of mass protests. Madden over the 2022 demise of Mahsa Amini, detained for now no longer wearing her famous headscarf well, escalated into demonstrations against social restrictions. In early January, rather a lot of of hundreds marched in cities at some point of the country, many chanting, “Death to Khamenei.”
Khamenei answered with the deadliest crackdown considered in almost 50 years of clerical rule as security forces opened fireplace on crowds, killing hundreds.
At the same time, the Mideast wars sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel plight in motion the crumple of the regionwide “Axis of Resistance” built by Khamenei. Israel and Iran attacked each other straight for the principle time in 2024. Israel struck Iran again in June 2025, because it and the US targeted the country’s nuclear program and killed top protection force officers and nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated by sending missiles and drones at Israel.
Khamenei’s demise raises questions in regards to the future of the Islamic Republic.
The 88-seat Assembly of Experts, a community of principally laborious-line clerics, will resolve Khamenei’s replacement. Nevertheless no certain successor is in dwelling.
As he launched the bombing Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump called on Iranians to “take hold of over your authorities. It is going to be yours to take hold of. This will likely be potentially your handiest likelihood for generations.” What happens next might well possibly additionally simply count drastically on our bodies just like the Innovative Guard, which has persistently shown its willingness to make employ of overwhelming force to maintain energy even as many of Iran’s 90 million individuals grow disenchanted.
“Culturally, the authorities is bankrupt,” mentioned Mehdi Khalaji, an analyst on the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, mentioned in 2017. “The ideology of the Islamic Republic did now no longer work in any admire.”
Khamenei’s daughter and son-in-legislation, a grandchild and a daughter-in-legislation also were killed in Saturday’s assault, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency, citing unidentified sources.
Iran’s authorities declared 40 days of public mourning and a seven-day nationwide public holiday to commemorate Khamenei’s demise.
From a puzzled originate to a laborious-line grip on Iran
Ali Khamenei became as soon as born into a spiritual family in the northeastern holy metropolis of Mashhad, a hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the fight against the Western-allied shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Cherish many other Iranian leaders, he studied under Khomeini on the seminary in the holy metropolis of Qom, south of Tehran, in the early 1960s, prior to Khomeini’s exile to Iraq and France.
Khamenei joined the anti-shah movement, facing time in each prison and in hiding. When Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph in February 1979 and proclaimed the Islamic Republic, Khamenei became as soon as appointed to the secretive Innovative Council. In 1981, he became as soon as elected Iran’s third president; that very same yr, a bombing by opponents left him with one hand disturbed.
With his thick, heavy-framed glasses, Khamenei lacked the steely scrutinize and fiery air of secrecy of Khomeini, the daddy of the Islamic Revolution. He fell a long way short of Khomeini’s spiritual scholarship, holding the somewhat low obnoxious of “hojatolislam” in the Shiite clerical hierarchy.
After being named supreme leader after Khomeini’s demise, he bounded in a single day to the stage of sizable ayatollah, on the head of the hierarchy, and for years needed to contend with skepticism over his credentials.
Khamenei acknowledged the doubts with humility. “I’m an individual with many faults and shortcomings and in actuality a minor seminarian,” he mentioned in his first speech in his recent post.
Regardless of his lack of charisma, Khamenei stabilized Iran after the Eighties warfare with Iraq and ruled for over three many years — a long way longer than Khomeini.
Demanding-liners thought of him 2d handiest to God in his authority. Khamenei created an ever-growing kinds of Shiite clerics and governmental businesses that blurred tasks and left him because the final arbiter. As Iran puzzled whether to maintain the Innovative Guard after the warfare with Iraq, Khamenei came to its rescue and allowed the paramilitary force to gain a highly effective grip on Iran’s financial system. He also aged a machine of appointees to undercut the civilian authorities elected by its individuals.
The rise and descend of Iran’s proxy forces
Below Khamenei’s reign, Iran shifted fully from primitive warfare to make stronger for proxies, building the so-called Axis of Resistance to strategy its interests in the space. The Lebanese militant community Hezbollah, established with Iran’s attend in the Eighties, drove Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000 and battled it to a stalemate in the monthlong 2006 warfare.
Via Hezbollah, Iran perfected a technique of making native militant groups its allies to project energy — often thru violence. Iran adopted that mannequin when backing Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who in 2014 seized the country’s capital, Sanaa, and held on for over a decade in a stalemated warfare in the Arab world’s poorest nation — regardless of facing a Saudi-led coalition and later, U.S.-led airstrikes over their assaults in the Crimson Sea corridor.
In diversified areas, suspected Iranian-backed militants bombed a Jewish heart in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 individuals. Iran also became as soon as allegedly linked to the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing advanced in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 individuals of the U.S. protection force. Iran denied responsibility for every assaults.
Iran emerged as a top beneficiary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which modified its main regional risk, Saddam Hussein, with a friendly Shiite-led authorities. Iranian-backed militias waged a brutal insurgency against U.S. forces and embedded themselves within the country’s political landscape.
Khamenei aged the Guard’s expeditionary Quds Power most successfully after the Sunni extremists of the Islamic Remark community seized huge swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Guard troops advised Shiite militias, the supreme opponents in Iraq, and gave famous make stronger to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil warfare.
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 ground operations pulverizing Hamas, which Iran had armed and funded for years. Israel is broadly believed to relish killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an operation in Tehran in 2024, extra embarrassing the Islamic Republic.
Hezbollah discovered its ranks targeted by exploding pagers and an Israeli campaign killed its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah. Then, in December 2024, riot opponents toppled Assad in an offensive in Syria, ending a half-century of his family’s autocratic rule.
Nuclear program advances to advance-weapons-grade levels
The supreme leader remained deeply suspicious of the U.S., referring to it because the “Grand Devil” even after President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, offering dialogue and a recent originate.
He shrugged off U.N. sanctions and pushed forward with Iran’s nuclear program, which the U.S. and its allies issue hid a secret project to create a nuclear weapon up till 2003. Khamenei issued a verbal fatwa, or spiritual ruling, that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, however vowed the country would never stop its glowing to gain what he called a serene nuclear vitality program.
Below Iran’s 2015 nuclear kind out world powers, Tehran agreed to drastically minimize its stockpile and enrichment of uranium in alternate for the lifting of economic sanctions. Nevertheless handiest three years later, Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew Washington from the accord, arguing it didn’t dawdle a long way sufficient.
Iran has since broken the total limits of the nuclear deal and gathered a stockpile of uranium enriched to almost weapons-grade levels, now huge sufficient to pursue several nuclear weapons if it selected to attain so. Diplomatic efforts to revive the deal under President Joe Biden stalled.
In a March 2011 speech, Khamenei aged toppled Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who had given up his gain nuclear program years earlier, as an illustration of why Iran’s nuclear program remained so famous in the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals in the Heart East.
“Factual the manner you give a lollipop to a child, Westerners gave ‘incentives’ to them and they gave up everything,” Khamenei mentioned.
Protests and demands for change intensified
Khamenei’s first main undertaking came in 1997, when professional-reform politicians gained maintain an eye on of parliament and cleric Mohammad Khatami became as soon as elected president by a landslide, riding an unlimited formative years vote. The reformists demanded a loosening of the strict social ideas imposed by the revolution and called for improved ties with the out of doors world, including the U.S.
Khamenei-backed laborious-liners moved to contain the liberal movement, fearing it will most likely well possibly well finally name for an stop to clerical rule. Khamenei stopped parliament from loosening restrictions on the media in an surprisingly overt intervention. Clerical our bodies blocked other key liberal legislation and banned many reformist lawmakers from running for reelection, ensuring a return of laborious-liner maintain an eye on in the 2004 elections.
That plight the stage for the election of laborious-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and his disputed reelection in 2009 amid prices of vote-rigging. Mass protests broke out, posing the supreme risk in many years to Iran’s clerical leadership. The Innovative Guard, Basij militia and police unleashed a crackdown in which dozens were killed and rather a lot of arrested.
The turmoil, and reports of protesters being tortured to demise or raped in prison, dealt a extreme blow to Khamenei’s plight.
As sanctions bit extra, standard unrest rose. Economic protests broke out in 2017 and demonstrations escalated in 2019 over a rise in authorities-plight gasoline prices. A bloody crackdown that adopted killed over 300 individuals, according to activists.
Although Khamenei struggled to maintain the ideological purity of the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s authorities has largely did no longer rid the country of Western influence. Satellite tv for computer dishes, banned in principle, crowd Tehran’s rooftops. Banned social media sites are broadly aged, even by some prominent politicians, regardless of being blocked.
Protests erupted again in 2022 over the demise of Amini, a young lady detained for now no longer wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. More than 500 individuals were killed and tens of hundreds arrested when security forces overwhelmed the demonstrations again.
In boring December 2025, recent economic protests erupted and would grow into what appeared as if it will most likely well possibly well be the supreme relate movement ever. Heaps of of hundreds at some point of the country took to the streets, overtly demanding an stop to the Islamic Republic. Some even chanted for the return of the shah’s son, living in exile since 1979. The ferocity of the crackdown horrified Iranians.
Disagreement with US
With U.S. President Donald Trump, Khamenei confronted a more aggressive and unpredictable American power to dwell 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 facets came terminate to warfare with the US after an American drone strike killed Innovative Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. At Soleimani’s mass funeral that drew tens of millions to the streets, Khamenei wept over the casket of the particular person he as soon as called a “living 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 support up, reaching 60% purity — a instant, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Calm, when Trump returned to the White House 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.
Nevertheless a deal remained elusive. In June, Israel and the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, inflicting heavy pain. How a long way support it plight this system remained unclear.
During the crackdown on nationwide protests in January, Trump renewed threats to strike, demanding Iran accomplish main concessions on the negotiating desk. Then came three rounds of indirect talks. Then came Saturday.
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Frail Associated Press author Brian Murphy contributed.
