Visual release of Iran attack
The United States has released images purporting to show American warships and aircraft launching attacks against Iran.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Ali Khamenei’s 36-year rule has built Iran into a powerful anti-American force, expanding its military influence across the Middle East while crushing repeated unrest at home with an iron fist.
Ayatollah Khamenei, 86, was killed on February 28 when Israeli and U.S. airstrikes shattered a compound in central Tehran, Iranian state media announced, after decades of efforts to resolve a dispute over Iran’s nuclear program failed diplomatically.
Initially dismissed as weak and indecisive, Khamenei seemed an unlikely choice as supreme leader after the death of the charismatic founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini. However, Khamenei’s rise to the top of the country’s power structure has given him a firm grip on state affairs.
Karim Sajjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Reuters that Khamenei was an “accident of history” that took him “from a weak president, to an initially weak supreme leader, to one of the five most powerful Iranians of the past 100 years.”
The Ayatollahs criticized Washington throughout their reign and continued to do so even after President Donald Trump’s second term began in 2025.
Khamenei vowed in January that the country would “not surrender to the enemy” as a new wave of protests spread across Iran with slogans such as “Death to the dictator” and President Trump threatened to intervene.
The comment was typical of Khamenei, a fiercely anti-Western leader who has been in office since 1989.
By maintaining the hardline stance of Khomeini, the republic’s first supreme leader, Khamenei crushed the ambitions of successive independence-minded elected presidents who called for more open policies at home and abroad.
In the process, critics say, he ensured Iran’s isolation.
Khamenei condemns ‘rude and arrogant leaders of America’
Khamenei has long denied that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, as Western countries have claimed. In 2015, he cautiously supported a nuclear deal between world powers and the government of pragmatic President Hassan Rouhani, curbing the country’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. This hard-won agreement resulted in a partial lifting of Iran’s economic and political isolation.
But Khamenei’s hostility toward the United States persisted and intensified in 2018, when the first Trump administration withdrew from the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions aimed at hampering Iran’s oil and shipping industries.
After the U.S. withdrawal, Khamenei backed hard-line supporters who criticized President Rouhani’s appeasement policy toward the West.
As President Trump pressurizes Iran to agree to a new 2025 nuclear deal, Khamenei blamed “disrespectful and arrogant American leaders.” “Who are you to decide whether Iran should have wealthy people?” he asked.
Khamenei often denounced the “Great Devil” in his speeches, reassuring hardliners who believed anti-American sentiment was at the heart of the 1979 revolution that drove Iran’s last shah into exile.
his word was law
Massive student-led protests erupted in Iran in 1999 and 2002. But Khamenei’s authority was put to a more serious test in 2009. The disputed presidential election results, which were verified by Khamenei, sparked violent street riots and triggered a crisis of legitimacy that lasted until Khamenei’s death.
In 2022, Khamenei cracked down on demonstrators enraged by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who died in the custody of the moral police in September of the same year.
Facing the most violent turmoil since the revolution, Khamenei blamed Western enemies and resorted to hanging protesters and displaying bodies suspended from cranes after months of unrest.
Iranians got the message.
As Supreme Leader, Khamenei’s word was law. He inherited vast powers, including command of the military and the power to appoint many key officials, including the head of the judiciary, security services, and state radio and television.
He appointed his allies as commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
As the ultimate authority in Iran’s complex system of clerical rule and limited democracy, Khamenei has long sought to prevent any group, even among his closest allies, from amassing enough power to challenge him and his anti-American stance.
Scholars outside Iran have painted a picture of a secretive ideologue fearing betrayal. That fear was fueled by an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm paralyzed.
International organizations and activists have repeatedly criticized human rights violations in Iran. He said Tehran has the best human rights record in the Islamic world.
unlikely to come to power
Ali Khamenei was born in April 1939 in Mashhad, northeastern Iran. His devotion to religion was evident when he became a priest at the age of 11. He studied in Qom, the religious capital of Iraq and Iran.
His father, an ethnic Azerbaijani religious scholar, was a traditionalist cleric who opposed mixing religion and politics. In contrast, his son embraced the cause of the Islamist revolution.
“My impression was that he (Khamenei’s father) was a modernist or progressive cleric,” said Mahmoud Moradhani, a nephew of Khamenei who opposes his rule and lives in exile. Unlike his son, “he was not part of the fundamentalist movement,” Moladkhani said.
In 1963, at the age of 24, Khamenei was detained for his political activities and served the first of many sentences. Later that year, he was imprisoned for 10 days in Mashhad, where he was severely tortured, according to his official biography.
After the fall of the Shah, Khamenei held several posts in the Islamic Republic. As deputy defense minister, he became close to the military and was a key figure in the 1980-88 war with neighboring Iraq, which claimed an estimated 1 million lives.
He was a skilled orator and was appointed by Khomeini to lead Friday prayers in Tehran.
There were also doubts about his rapid and unprecedented rise. He rose to the presidency with Khomeini’s support and became the first cleric, making him a surprising choice to succeed Khomeini, given his lack of both popularity and great clerical qualifications.
Expanding Iranian influence
The connection with the powerful Guards came to fruition in 2009. That year, Guards suppressed protests after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected amid opposition accusations of voter fraud.
He also presided over a vast financial empire with assets worth tens of billions of dollars through Settad, an organization founded by Khomeini but greatly expanded under Khamenei.
Khamenei expanded Iran’s influence in the region, empowering Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Lebanon, and sending thousands of soldiers to Syria to support then-President Bashar al-Assad.
He spent billions of dollars over four decades on allies such as Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, and the Axis of Resistance, which also includes Yemen’s Houthis, to counter Israeli and American power in the Middle East.
However, in 2024, Khamenei saw these alliances crumble and Iran’s regional influence shrink due to a series of defeats, including the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad and the killing of their leaders by Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Under Khamenei’s rule, Iran and Israel fought a shadow war for years, with Israel assassinating Tehran’s nuclear scientists and Revolutionary Guards commanders.
The bomb exploded in the open air during Israel’s fight against Hamas in the Gaza Strip starting in 2023. In April 2024, Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel after it bombed Tehran’s embassy compound in Damascus. Israel responded by attacking mainland Iran.
But that was just a prelude until June 2025, when the Israeli military launched hundreds of warplanes to attack Iran’s nuclear and military targets and senior personnel. This surprise attack triggered a barrage of missiles in both directions, turning the smoldering conflict into an all-out war. The United States joined the Iranian air force, which lasted 12 days.
The United States and Israel have threatened to strike again if Iran advances its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and on February 28 launched its most ambitious attack on Iranian targets in decades.
Negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials took place as recently as February 26, with senior U.S. officials saying Iran has no intention of giving up its uranium enrichment capabilities, arguing that Iran wants it for nuclear energy, while U.S. officials argued it would enable the country to build a nuclear bomb.
On the diplomatic front, Khamenei has refused to normalize diplomatic relations with the United States. He claimed that Washington was supporting hard-line groups like the Islamic State to foment sectarian wars in the region.
Like other Iranian officials, Khamenei denies any intention to develop nuclear weapons, and even issued a fatwa in the mid-1990s against the “manufacturing and use” of nuclear weapons, stating that “it goes against our Islamic ideology.”
He also supported a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 calling on Muslims to kill Indian-born author Salman Rushdie after his novel The Satanic Verses was published.
Khamenei’s official website confirmed as recently as 2017 that the death sentence remained in effect. Five years later, Rushdie was stabbed while giving a public lecture in New York. The author was seriously injured, but survived. The perpetrator was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder in 2025, but did not testify at trial.
The Islamic Republic, left behind by the late ayatollah, is grappling with uncertainty amid attacks from Israel and the United States, and growing dissent within the country, especially among younger generations.
“I just want to live a peaceful and normal life…Instead, they (the rulers) insist on a nuclear program, support regional armed groups and maintain hostility towards the United States,” Mina, 25, told Reuters by phone from Kudasht in the western province of Lorestan in early 2026.
“These policies may have made sense in 1979, but they don’t make sense today,” the unemployed university graduate added. “The world has changed.”
(Written by Parisa Hafezi; Edited by Olivier Holmy, Michael George, William MacLean, Janet Lawrence, Raju Gopalakrishnan)
