A bitter enemy of the West who ruled Iran with an iron fist for decades

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, was an inveterate foe of the West, crushing internal opposition while supporting proxy forces around the region in the hope of making his country respected and feared.

US President Donald Trump confirmed on social media that Khamenei had been killed in an airstrike on Saturday, describing him as “one of the most evil people in history”. Satellite images showed significant damage to the Iranian leader’s Tehran compound, one of the first targets of the bombing campaign.

Khamenei’s death represents a massive blow to the Islamic Republic that he had led since 1989, a decade after rising to prominence in the theocratic revolution that toppled Iran’s monarchy and rocked the Middle East.

He had survived foreign pressure before but, even before Saturday’s attack, was facing the gravest crisis of his 36-year rule, attempting to spin out negotiations with the United States over Iran’s nuclear program.

Deadly crackdown

Already this year, he had 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 who were chanting “Death to the dictator!”

And only last June, Khamenei had been forced into hiding during 12 days of airstrikes by Israel and then the US that killed several close associates and Revolutionary Guard commanders and smashed prized nuclear and missile facilities.

That assault was among the many indirect results of the attack on Israel by the Iranian-backed Palestinian group Hamas on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza and spurred Israel to hammer Tehran’s other regional proxies.

With Hezbollah weakened in Lebanon and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad toppled, Khamenei’s reach across the Middle East was stunted, while the US demanded he abandon Iran’s last major strategic lever – its ballistic missiles.

Khamenei refused to even discuss giving up missiles, which Iran saw as its only remaining deterrent to Israeli attack, a display of intransigence that may have helped invite the airstrikes that targeted him.

As the US military massed air and naval forces in the region, Khamenei’s calculations drew on a character moulded by revolution, years of turmoil and war with Iraq, decades of sparring with the US and a ruthless accumulation of power.

While elected officials managed day-to-day affairs, no major policy – especially one concerning the US – could proceed without his explicit approval; Khamenei’s mastery of Iran’s complex system of clerical rule combined with limited democracy ensured that no other group could challenge his decisions.

An unlikely rise to power

Early in his rule, Khamenei was often dismissed as weak and an unlikely successor to the Islamic Republic’s late founder, the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Not having achieved the religious rank of ayatollah when he was appointed supreme leader, Khamenei had difficulty wielding power through religious authority, as the theocratic system foresaw.

After struggling for a long time to emerge from the shadow of his mentor, it was by forging a formidable security apparatus devoted solely to him that he finally imposed himself.

Khamenei always distrusted the West, particularly the US, frequently accusing it of seeking to topple him. In a typically pugnacious speech after January’s protests, he blamed 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.”

Yet despite his ideological rigidity, he showed a willingness to bend when the survival of the Islamic Republic was at stake.

The concept of “heroic flexibility”, first mentioned by Khamenei in 2013, permitted tactical compromises to advance his goals, mirroring Khomeini’s choice in 1988 to embrace a ceasefire after eight years of war with Iraq.

Khamenei’s guarded endorsement of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers was another such moment, as he calculated that sanctions relief was necessary to stabilise the economy and buttress his grip on power.

Trump quit the 2015 pact during his first term in 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran. Tehran reacted by gradually violating all agreed curbs on its nuclear program.

Security loyalty key

At times of increasing pressure, Khamenei repeatedly turned to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, a paramilitary force numbering hundreds of thousands of volunteers, to snuff out dissent.

It was they who crushed the protests that exploded after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election as president in 2009 amid allegations of vote fraud.

In 2022, Khamenei was just as ruthless in arresting, imprisoning or executing protesters enraged by the death in custody of the young Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini.

And it was again the Revolutionary Guard and Basij which crushed the latest round of protests in January.

Khamenei’s power has also owed much to the parastatal financial empire known as Setad, under his direct control. Worth tens of billions of dollars, it grew hugely during his rule, investing billions in the Revolutionary Guard.

Scholars outside Iran have painted a picture of a secretive ideologue fearful of betrayal – an anxiety fuelled by an assassination attempt in June 1981 that involved a bomb hidden in a tape recorder that paralysed his right arm.

Khamenei himself suffered severe torture, according to his official biography, in 1963, when at 24 he served the first of many terms in prison for political activities under the rule of the Shah.

After the Iranian Revolution, as deputy defence minister, Khamenei became close to the Revolutionary Guard during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, which claimed a million lives from both sides.

He won the presidency with Khomeini’s support but was a surprise choice as successor when the supreme leader died, lacking both Khomeini’s popular appeal and his superior clerical credentials.

Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that “accident of history” had transformed a “weak president to an initially weak supreme leader to one of the five
most powerful Iranians of the last 100 years”.