Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader of Iran until his death on February 28th 2026. He was 86 years old, partially paralysed and increasingly frail. He has served as leader for 37 years, outliving or outsmarting his rivals and turning officials, clerics and commanders into yes-men. He became supreme leader in 1989. In 1988, as Iran's president, he vowed to make the Persian Gulf a "graveyard" for the Americans. His goals have changed little since: he wants to ensure the survival of Iran's clerical regime, which in his mind requires swearing off any compromise, whether political reform at home or a less confrontational foreign policy towards America.
Khamenei grew up in Mashhad, a sacred city, the son of a religious scholar. He was raised with many siblings in a single room and a damp basement, sometimes subsisting on bread and raisins. His mother quoted the poet Hafiz to him. A fiery speech he heard at 13 at school, inveighing against the American-backed monarchy, planted the seed of his hatred of the West. He was a literary boy: the books he most enjoyed were "Uncle Tom's Cabin", "The Grapes of Wrath" and, especially, Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables"—all about the struggles of the poor. He also enjoyed music. From four years old he was immersed in Islamic studies, eventually studying in Qom. As a young man he was jailed six times and beaten and tortured by the Shah's secret police.
By the 1980s Khamenei was still a hujjat al-islam, equivalent to a middle-ranking Christian priest. He was the mild cleric sent to wish the American hostages Happy Christmas. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, his long-term mentor and friend, appointed him to the presidency; after Khomeini's allies elevated him to the supreme leadership, the constitution was amended to overlook his lack of learning, and he was made an ayatollah almost at once. He wore the black cap of a direct descendant of Muhammad. He preached and wrote books on forgiveness, patience and "101 tips for a happy marriage".
Though many underrated him, Khamenei proved adept at playing Iran's state institutions off against each other—the presidency against parliament, the army against the IRGC—making himself the final arbiter. Whereas presidents had a limit of two consecutive terms, he was appointed for life. The Guardian Council, a quango of clerics and lawyers, vetted electoral candidates and increasingly disqualified all but his favourites. Rival ayatollahs were co-opted with government money and jobs. His office expanded with commissars in all government departments, provinces and military units. A force of over 1m paramilitaries enforced ideological discipline at home. An "axis of resistance"—Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen—carried it abroad.
Khamenei lived frugally, receiving visitors in a bare room with one sofa and a few wooden chairs, but he controlled assets worth tens of billions of dollars. Soon after his succession he took over the Shia charities from the government and turned them into vast conglomerates that hoovered up state contracts. He also seized the properties the Shah's men had abandoned when they fled the Islamic revolution.
An attack by dissident revolutionaries in 1981 paralysed his right arm. He said he did not need his arm, as long as his brain and tongue worked. The experience taught him never to concede.
Khamenei came to disdain foreign investment, in case it increased "Westoxification" in Iran. During the pandemic he refused to import Western vaccines, because they might bring the virus in. Only "heroic flexibility" induced him to agree to the nuclear deal with America in 2015; then Donald Trump tore it up and tried, with Israel, to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. He had four sons, all of them clerics, but said his legacy was not necessarily a dynasty: he was thinking of his "Second Step" of the Islamic revolution, more pious and more energetic.
Khamenei has become the overseer and champion of Iran's nuclear talks with America, which entered their fourth round in 2025. A decade earlier, during the negotiations that led to the JCPOA in 2015, he was a sceptic. Now he is united with Iran's elites behind engagement. He has shifted his rhetorical references from Imam Hussein, who chose martyrdom over surrender, to Hussein's brother Hassan, who capitulated to tyranny for peace. His advisers suggest he is ready to sue for peace if it preserves his regime.
Khamenei is purging firebrands from the system. He has installed Masoud Pezeshkian, who has publicly called for friendship with America, as president rather than a hardliner. He packed off Morteza Ghorbani, an IRGC commander who once threatened to sink America's navy, to run a shooting club. Mohammed Bagheri, his chief of staff who oversaw the IRGC, appeared in civilian clothes at Persepolis ahead of the American talks and delivered a message of peace. Bagheri was killed on June 13th 2025 in Israel's strikes on Iran's nuclear installations.
The symbols of the "Great Satan" are vanishing from Iran's streets. At Tehran University the American flag that students had to tread on when entering the college has been removed. Preachers are dropping "Death to America!" after Friday prayers. The police who once beat up women rejecting the mandatory veil now do the same to those demanding its enforcement.
Khamenei has a fatwa against nuclear weapons, which his advisers say has prevented Iran from breaking out. They warn that a successor—whether a military commander or a monarch—might abandon the fatwa and rush to build a bomb.
Under Article 111 of the constitution, should the supreme leader be killed or incapacitated, the president, the head of the judiciary and a senior cleric would form a caretaker committee. In practice, Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, already outranked them, shaping Iran's strategy as the supreme leader slipped in and out of view.
Khamenei is partially paralysed and increasingly frail. He is said to have drawn up a shortlist of possible successors. His son Mojtaba—long tipped as a possible heir—is reportedly not on it; even cynics blanch at the idea of the revolutionary regime that overthrew a monarchy reverting to dynastic rule. Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, a daughter of a former president and a political prisoner, has nonetheless endorsed Mojtaba, likening him to Saudi Arabia's Muhammad bin Salman, an autocratic moderniser. Top posts in Iran often go to relatively obscure figures, buoyed by different factions. Financial interests are likely to loom as large as ideological differences in the scramble for power.
When Israel launched its strikes on June 13th 2025, Khamenei went into hiding. Ali Shamkhani, one of his closest advisers, was targeted in an assassination attempt and was either killed or grievously wounded. Israel's success in assassinating commanders in their bedrooms revealed the extent of disloyalty within the regime's inner circle, which is riven by cronyism and paranoia.
Isolated for his own safety, Khamenei delegated decision-making to a new council, or shura, dominated by the IRGC. An observer opined that "the country is in effect under martial law." The war heightened the Guards' ascendance. The regime rounded up hundreds of alleged Israeli spies; at least six were executed.
Since the June 2025 war Khamenei has faded from public view, appearing only rarely and delivering brief sermons. To appeal to a population disenchanted with clerical rule, he has dressed his theocracy in nationalist clothes. At Ashura celebrations on July 5th he ordered a cantor to drop incantations and sing Ey Iran, a patriotic anthem popular before the 1979 revolution that had since been suppressed. He has played down Shia saints and puffed up Iran's pre-Islamic past. He has also turned a blind eye to a wildly popular Persian version of "Love Island" and other reality shows. Yet political reform remains off the table: he reappointed the 99-year-old head of the Guardian Council for the 33rd time and has kept reformists off state-media airwaves. Executions are up.
Rivals are circling. Two former presidents, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Rouhani, are plotting comebacks. Ali Larijani, a former speaker of parliament, led a delegation to Moscow that met Vladimir Putin, sidelining president Pezeshkian. Mir Hossein Moussavi, a former prime minister whom Khamenei has kept under house arrest for 15 years, released a petition on July 11th calling for a new constitution.
When protests erupted in late December 2025, Khamenei's regime looked more rattled than the scale of the unrest warranted. Officials who had been waiting for his death to bring change began wanting it sooner. Saeed Laylaz, an economist favoured by the regime, urged Khamenei to step aside in favour of a "Bonaparte", naming Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the parliamentary speaker. Some considered a Venezuelan-style solution: sacrificing the supreme leader to save the system. Khamenei's 37th year as supreme leader mirrors the 37 years on the throne of the last shah, who was toppled in 1979.
Khamenei accused protesters of sedition and defended killing them. He met the January 2026 protests with the worst bout of state violence in the regime's 47-year history. Snipers fired into crowds; surveillance drones buzzed overhead. HRANA, a Washington-based monitor, has verified more than 4,500 deaths and 26,000 arrests; the real toll may approach 20,000. Parents pay "bullet taxes"—ransoms of thousands of dollars—to retrieve their children's bodies. Masked men enforce de facto martial law and a curfew in Tehran. He relies on a base of some 13m voters who backed a hardliner in the last election. The social contract had ruptured: Iran could neither protect its citizens from external threats nor provide for their basic needs. The regime adopted the logic of Bashar al-Assad, its one-time ally in Syria, whose goons once chanted "Assad or we burn the country". As of mid-January the protesters had withdrawn from the streets, though the ebb did not necessarily signal the end of unrest, as Iran's own history shows: at the start of the Islamic revolution in 1978, protests grew in spring, dwindled in summer and roared back in autumn.
In early February 2026 Khamenei was said to have moved to a fortified bunker in anticipation of an American strike, as Donald Trump deployed a "beautiful armada" to the Middle East. His hybrid theocracy-cum-democracy has morphed into a security state: drones patrol the skies, spot-checks of mobile phones net those with suspect sympathies, and a three-week internet blackout crippled the digital economy. He warned America that "if it starts a war, this time it will be a regional war."
On February 28th 2026 Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike at the outset of a joint American-Israeli attack on Iran. Hours after his death was confirmed, a three-man council was named to lead the country, in line with the constitution. The assembly of experts, a body of 88 regime-approved clerics, began consultations to choose a new supreme leader. Mojtaba Khamenei, his second son, succeeded him as supreme leader. The younger Khamenei had never held office, lacked a public profile or religious credentials (he was a mid-ranking cleric, not an ayatollah), and even some supporters of the regime resented the idea of a hereditary succession: they did not overthrow a monarchy in 1979 simply to install another one. But he had spent decades working as his father's aide and had forged close ties with the IRGC. He is thought to be more eager than his father to acquire a nuclear weapon. Along with the supreme leader, dozens of other officials were killed, among them the defence minister and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Donald Trump addressed Khamenei as "azizam"—"my dear" in Persian—in a letter, conferring international recognition on his supremacy and quietening clamours for regime change.
The most disagreeable thing that your worst enemy says to your face does not approach what your best friends say behind your back.