FRANCE 24- Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 died age 86 in a major attack on Iran launched by Israel and the United States. The country’s supreme leader from 1989 –2026, Khamenei was a conservative cleric with fervent political beliefs whose tight grip on power led to the consolidation of an authoritarian regime in Iran and direct confrontations with the West and Israel.
Khamenei was born in July 1939 in the northeastern city of Mashad. His family was very religious and hailed from Iran’s Turkish-speaking Azeri minority.
As a young man, he began advanced religious studies in the holy city of Qom under the tutelage of Iran’s future theocrat, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “In the areas of political and revolutionary ideas and Islamic jurisprudence, I am certainly a disciple of Imam Khomeini,” read a quote from Khamenei on his official website.
A studious disciple with a passion for poetry, Khamenei not only followed his mentor’s religious teachings, he also followed Khomeini into politics, joining the Islamic opposition during Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign.
Launched by Khomeini in 1960, the Islamic opposition aimed to overthrow the shah, who ruled as an absolute monarch. Khamenei was arrested and imprisoned multiple times for participating in anti-regime protests before the fall of the monarchy during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Khomeini’s subsequent triumphant return to Iran from exile.
The Islamic revolution also kick-started Khamenei’s own political rise. When Khomeini became Iran’s new supreme leader, he appointed Khamenei to the influential position of the imam leading Tehran’s Friday Prayers. He also became the supreme leader’s representative on the Iranian Supreme Defence Council.
Controversial succession
In June 1981, Khamenei survived an assassination attempt when a bomb hidden inside a tape recorder exploded next to him in a Tehran mosque. He lost the use of his right arm in the attack. “I felt that God was sparing me and saving me for heavier responsibilities,” he later said of the incident.
Four months after the assassination attempt, Khamenei, aged 41, was elected Iran’s president with a landslide 95 percent of the vote. He was re-elected in 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war.
The day after Khomeini’s death on June 3, 1989, Khamenei was appointed as Iran’s new supreme leader following an extraordinary meeting of the Assembly of Experts.
Khomeini himself had chosen Khamenei to be his political successor, ousting previous candidate Ayatollah Ali Montazeri for his democratic leanings. But it was a post he was supposed to hold for an interim period until a more religiously qualified candidate was selected.
Despite Khamenei’s black turban marking him as a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, he held only an intermediate rank in the Shiite clergy.
In controversial circumstances that remain unclear, Khamenei was hastily appointed ayatollah without having completed the required theological studies.
Once in power, Khamenei took advantage of a power struggle between future Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ahmed Khomeini (the son of the former leader) – both of whom coveted his post – to consolidate his position.
As a new leader holding increasingly radical and conservative beliefs, he made constitutional amendments giving him total control over the country and its institutions under the principle of velayat-e-faqih, or “rule of religious jurists”, enshrining the supremacy of the clergy over the state.
Ultimately, Khamenei took complete control of all the levers of power in Iran. He operated as supreme commander of the Iranian armed forces, giving him final say in matters of security, defence and foreign policy. He had the power to dismiss the president and validate presidential elections, and he appointed all of the country’s top security chiefs and the head of the judiciary.
Green movement, Mahsa Amini: protests against authority
Although Khamenei lacked the religious authority of his predecessor, he was deeply political.
On the home front, he took advantage of the balance of power within the regime and began to use Iran’s security forces, including the Revolutionary Guards, to implement his policies. He formed a close relationship with General Qasem Soleimani, who was considered Khamenei’s second in command until he was assassinated by a US drone strike in January 2020.
Overseas, Khamenei adopted a strategy of tension with the West and with neighbouring Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia.
Khamenei managed to maintain his grip on power with bloody suppressions of street protests, including the 1999 student protest, the Green Movement against the controversial 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and protests against rising prices in 2017 and 2019.
In September 2022, a massive protest movement was sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in hospital after being arrested by the morality police for improperly wearing her hijab. Widespread outrage over suspected police brutality gave rise to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, with protestors calling for “death to the dictator”.
In the year after Amini’s death, NGOs reported more than 500 protesters were killed by the regime.
An isolated regime
Alongside homegrown protest movements that tested Khamenei’s authority and pushed his regime to its limits, on the international stage he became the central figure in one of the most significant geopolitical conflicts of the 21st century: Iran’s nuclear programme.
Accusations from the West and Israel that Iran was secretly developing its own nuclear weapon were denied by Tehran. The regime’s isolation on the international stage increased with tense negotiations with major international powers, who slapped sanctions that brought the Iranian economy to its knees.
In 2015, Khamenei – who frequently criticised the US for its “deviant culture” and “criminal diplomacy” – gave his approval for the sweeping nuclear deal between Iran and the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. Under the deal, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear programme, accepting surprise UN nuclear inspections, in exchange for sanctions relief.
The nuclear deal was viewed with suspicion in Israel and Saudi Arabia, particularly as Iran increased its influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, stoking tensions in the region.
In 2018, during US President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the US withdrew from the nuclear deal and slapped crippling sanctions against Tehran, reigniting tensions between Iran, the West and western allies in the Middle East.
On Khamenei’s orders, Iran retaliated by accelerating its nuclear programme.
By 2021 – as talks aimed at reinstating the treaty resumed, with indirect participation from the US – the Islamic Republic had reached nuclear milestones including increasing its uranium enrichment rate to an unprecedented 60 percent.
On October 7, 2023, an unprecedented attack on Israel by Palestinian militant group Hamas triggered a chain of events that would destabilise Khamenei’s position on the international stage.
Hamas was part of an “axis of resistance” in the Middle East, created by Khamenei and Soleimani, uniting militant and political organisations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
Retaliatory attacks by Israel on Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in the wake of the October 7 attack largely decimated their leadership, taking out what Khamenei intended to be a first line of defence deterring direct attacks on the Islamic Republic.
In the autumn of 2024, Khamenei watched helplessly as Israel eliminated Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who had pledged allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader, along with Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In Syria, rebels toppled long-term ally Bashar al-Assad, leaving Khamenei’s grip on the region dramatically diminished.
Hunted by Netanyahu
With Iran’s proxies weakened, the path was cleared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch direct attacks on Iran that he said would dismantle Khamenei’s nuclear programme.
A 12-day war broke out in June 2025, when Israeli strikes targeted hundreds of military and nuclear sites in Iran, killing high-ranking Iranian officials and nuclear scientists.
Tehran launched drones and missile attacks on sites across Israel in response, notably targeting Tel Aviv and Haifa.
After the US joined the fray, launching strikes on targets in central Iran, all sides accepted a ceasefire deal imposed by Trump.
As Khamenei went into hiding while his country was bombarded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that killing the ayatollah “would put an end to the conflict”.
The Unites States “know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding”, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. “He’s an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
Read moreAli Khamenei: Backed into a corner, Iran’s ruthless leader faces fight for survival
During the conflict, none of Tehran’s allies, such as China and Russia, came to Khamenei’s aid. Iran’s supreme leader emerged from the 12-day war having suffered the double humiliation of discovering the extent to which Israeli spies had infiltrated the highest echelons of his regime, and of seemingly owing his survival to the US president.
In January, he has ordered the deadliest crackdown since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, saying those protesting nationwide, initially against soaring prices, “should be put in their place” before security forces opened fire on demonstrators chanting “Death to the dictator!”. He blamed US President Donald Trump for the unrest, saying: “We consider the US president criminal for the casualties, damages and slander he inflicted on the Iranian nation.”
Under pressure to negotiate, Tehran agreed to several rounds of talks, while the US president threatened the Islamic Republic with military intervention if the discussions did not result in an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.
On February 28, Israel and the United States launched a campaign of air strikes described as “preventive” against Iran, stating that it was expected to last “several days.” Donald Trump directly calls on the Iranian people to “seize” power. Among the targets in Tehran was Ali Khamenei’s coumpound.
Khamenei’s death, after decades of consolidating his grip on power, opens a period of deep uncertainty for Iran, the future of its nuclear programme and the survival of a regime that is increasingly isolated internationally and rejected by much of the country’s youth.
Adapted from the original in French by Joanna York
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