OBITUARY | Khamenei’s four-decade rule ends in air strikes as Iran enters uncertain era

Washington — The 36-year rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei built Iran into a powerful anti-US 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 US that pulverised his central Tehran compound, after decades of efforts to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme 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 US 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. In the process, he ensured Iran’s isolation, critics say.

[paywall]

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.

[/paywall]