Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES—Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who assembled theocratic power in Iran over the decades as its supreme leader and sought to turn it into a regional powerhouse, bringing it into confrontation with Israel and the United States over its nuclear program while crushing democracy protesters at home, has died. He was 86.
Iranian state media reported the death early Sunday, after a major attack launched by Israel and the United States. US President Donald Trump said hours earlier that Khamenei had been killed in the joint operation.
Khamenei dramatically remolded the Islamic Republic since he took the reins after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Khomeini was the fiery, charismatic ideologue who led the overthrow of the shah and installed rule by Shiite Muslim clerics tasked with spreading religious purity. It fell to Khamenei, a stodgier figure with weaker religious credentials and a leaden demeanor, to turn that revolutionary vision into a state establishment.
‘Death to Khamenei’
He ended up ruling far longer than Khomeini. He greatly expanded the Shiite clerical class and built the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard into the most important body underpinning his rule. The Guard became a military and business behemoth, the country’s most elite force and head of its ballistic missile arsenal, with hands across Iran’s economic sectors.
But the strains became harder to contain. Political repression and the faltering economy fueled bigger waves of mass protests successively. Anger over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, detained for not wearing her mandatory headscarf properly, escalated into demonstrations against social restrictions. In early January, hundreds of thousands marched in cities across the country, many chanting, “Death to Khamenei.”
Deadliest crackdown
Khamenei responded with the deadliest crackdown seen in nearly 50 years of clerical rule as security forces opened fire on crowds, killing thousands.
At the same time, the Mideast wars sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel set in motion the collapse of the regionwide “Axis of Resistance” built by Khamenei. Israel and Iran attacked each other directly for the first time in 2024. Israel struck Iran again in June 2025, as it and the United States targeted the country’s nuclear program and killed top military officers and nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated by sending missiles and drones at Israel.
No clear successor
Khamenei’s death raises questions about the future of the Islamic Republic.
The 88-seat Assembly of Experts, a group of mostly hardline clerics, will choose Khamenei’s replacement. But no clear successor is in place.
As he launched the bombing in February, Trump called on Iranians to “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” What happens next may depend greatly on bodies like the Revolutionary Guard, which has repeatedly shown its willingness to use overwhelming force to keep power even as many of Iran’s 90 million people grow disenchanted.
Born to a religious family
“Culturally, the government is bankrupt,” said Mehdi Khalaji, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in 2017. “The ideology of the Islamic Republic did not work at all.”
Ali Khamenei was born into a religious family in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad, a hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the struggle against the Western-allied Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Like many other Iranian leaders, he studied under Khomeini at the seminary in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, in the early 1960s, before Khomeini’s exile to Iraq and France.
Khamenei joined the antiShah movement, facing time in both prison 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 same year, a bombing by opponents left him with one hand paralyzed.
Grand ayatollah
With his thick, heavy-framed glasses, Khamenei lacked the steely gaze and fiery aura of Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution. He fell far short of Khomeini’s religious scholarship, holding the relatively low rank of “hojatolislam” in the Shiite clerical hierarchy.
After being named supreme leader after Khomeini’s death, he bounded overnight to the level of grand ayatollah, at the top of the hierarchy, and for years had to deal with skepticism over his credentials.
Khamenei acknowledged the doubts with humility. “I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian,” he said in his first speech in his new post.
Despite his lack of charisma, Khamenei stabilized Iran after the 1980s war with Iraq and governed for over three decades—far longer than Khomeini.
Axis of Resistance
Hardliners considered him second only to God in his authority. Khamenei created an ever-growing bureaucracy of Shiite clerics and governmental agencies that blurred responsibilities and left him as the ultimate arbiter. As Iran questioned whether to keep the Revolutionary Guard after the war with Iraq, Khamenei came to its rescue and allowed the paramilitary force to gain a powerful grip on Iran’s economy. He also used a system of appointees to undercut the civilian government elected by its people.
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