Iran leader Ali Khamenei is dead after US-Israel airstrikes

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran who ruled over the Islamic Republic for more than three decades as it faced off with the West, was killed Saturday after the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Tehran. He was 86.

Iranian media on Sunday confirmed the death, saying Khamenei was killed in his office compound and that there will be 40 days of national mourning.

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“This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS,” US President Donald Trump wrote in a social media post.

With Khamenei’s demise, a hugely consequential chapter in Iran’s modern history closes with little certainty over what comes next or who’s lined up to succeed him.

A senior member of the clergy Khamenei emerged from the religious, anti-imperialist movement that took control of the country’s 1979 revolution.

With his white beard, clerical robes and black turban, he projected the image of an austere patriarch.

An unsmiling figure, Khamenei never left Iran after taking office. He used his authority to suppress protests against his leadership and the Islamic system that he helped build. His unflinching response to the backlash against his views on women’s rights and civil liberties reinforced his reputation as a leader willing to kill hundreds of civilians to stay in power.

Khamenei defined Iran’s position in the Middle East as a staunch enemy of Israel and an uncompromising obstacle to US attempts to influence and shape the region. He made sure his deep-seated distrust and contempt for the US — which stemmed from Washington’s history of interference in Iranian politics and its propping up of a monarchy that had imprisoned him — was always at the forefront of Iranian political life.

He repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, characterizing it as a cancerous tumor in the region.

Khamenei “sought relentlessly to transform the traditional Islamic concept of jihad” — a faith-based struggle against evil, as represented by the West and especially the US — “and to establish it as the central issue in the Islamist regime’s ideology,” wrote Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

While Khamenei was far from alone in his emphasis on jihad, his “novel contribution” was to make it “the grounding of the entire ideological system of the Islamic Republic and the sole basis of the Iranian regime’s statecraft,” Khalaji wrote.

From 1989, when he succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader, Khamenei protected the interests of hard-line religious institutions and the military — often going against the grain of popular opinion, which mostly favoured reform and closer ties to the West.

Deadly crackdown 

When an uprising erupted in 2022 after a young woman died in the custody of the so-called morality police who enforced strict religious dress codes, Khamenei responded with a deadly crackdown involving both the security forces and the use of judicial executions.

The response to the recent nationwide protests that erupted on Dec. 28 was even more crushing and brutal.

Rights groups are still verifying the dead — so far tallied at more than 7 000 — after authorities imposed a full internet blackout on the country, throttling people’s access to the outside world during the uprising’s bloodiest weekend.

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