Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader Who Built a De Facto Military Dictatorship, Killed in U.S.-Israeli Strikes
The years did not mellow Ali Khamenei. Appointed Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran at age 50, he was the longest serving ruler in the Middle East at the time of his death at 86 on Feb. 28, 2026. The Islamic Republic had been founded by his mentor, Ruhollah Khomeini, the grand ayatollah who, after the 1979 revolution, replaced a monarchy with a theocracy. But it was Khamenei who ruled for three-quarters of the Republic’s existence, transforming it into a de facto military dictatorship.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Read more: Iran’s Supreme Leader Killed in U.S.-Israeli Attacks
Sometimes clothes do make the man. Khamenei wore the turban of a senior Shiite cleric. But the pale plaid kerchief often looped around his neck was favored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the praetorian force he elevated to near co-ruler status. By the early 2000s, the Guards had consolidated military, political, and economic power so extensively that a prominent Iranian economist remarked, with raised eyebrows, that the only comparison was to National Socialism in 1930s Germany.
If that arrangement solidified Khamenei’s rule, it left little for Iran’s 93 million people—and even less after the regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon triggered intensifying international sanctions that sent the economy into free fall at the end of 2025. With hard-currency reserves depleted and inflation soaring, Iranians took to the streets en-masse, chanting for the regime’s downfall. On Khamenei’s orders, security forces killed an estimated 30,000 people, according to senior health officials.
Over the following months, Trump opened negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program while deploying two aircraft carrier groups and additional warplanes to the region, the largest U.S. military buildup there since the 2003 invasion of Iraq—an armada that was finally unleashed on Iran in the early hours of Feb 28.
Iran’s supreme leader was killed that morning in the opening barrage, after a joint U.S. and Israeli aerial assault targeted military and government sites across the country. Trump confirmed the death in a post on Truth Social, writing: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead.”
For decades, Khamenei had sought to defy both the United States—“the Great Satan” leading a godless West—and Israel, while adhering to an overriding imperative: preserve the regime at all costs.
That imperative may explain why, in his later years, he spent extended periods underground. The bunker beneath his compound in central Tehran lies so deep that one visitor timed the elevator descent at more than five minutes. After June 2025, when Israel (for 12 days) and the United States (for one) launched strikes aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear program and decapitating the IRGC leadership, Khamenei curtailed public appearances. He stopped holding regular meetings with Iran’s elected President and emerged only for defiant speeches in controlled environments.
“An aircraft carrier is a dangerous machine,” he acknowledged in a Feb. 17 speech. “But even more dangerous than that is the weapon capable of sending it to the bottom of the sea.”
A life defined by sanctimony and violence
The son of a cleric, Khamenei grew up in modest circumstances in the eastern city of Mashhad. As a religious student, he gravitated toward Shiite thinkers who fused political absolutism with theology. He became that unlikely figure: a militant cleric. During the 1960s and 1970s, he endured torture and solitary confinement in the prisons of the U.S.-backed Shah, whose overthrow became the central project of his youth.
After the Islamic Revolution, as a key aide to Khomeini, he rose quickly. In 1981, as he was about to address a news conference, a bomb planted by a rival faction exploded beside him, leaving his dominant right hand effectively useless and in chronic pain. Months later, when Iran’s President, Mohammad Ali Rajai, and 99 others were killed in another bombing, Khamenei was chosen as his successor. In his inaugural address, he denounced “deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists,” previewing a tenure defined by ideological rigidity.
When Khomeini died in 1989, shortly after accepting a ceasefire in the eight-year war with Iraq (to preserve the regime, he said) there was no clear successor. Khamenei, recently returned from a trip to North Korea and China, was only a junior cleric in a Shi’ite tradition noted for its adherence to hierarchy. But a battlefield promotion to Ayatollah was arranged, blending faith with politics in an exercise that critics said sullied both even before Khamenei reinforced his position by earthly means, elevating the IRGC.
On state television, Khamenei projected an avuncular demeanor, his spectacles framing a sharp gaze. Visiting journalists were told that his favorite novel was Les Miserables and that, in a sclerotic theocracy, his wristwatch signaled modern tastes. But when delivering Friday sermons, he rested his good hand on the barrel of a rifle.
In the 1990s, when Iranian voters elected reformist figures to the presidency and parliament, Khamenei moved to contain them. Newspapers were closed, dissidents jailed, and candidates kept off the ballot. At one point, he ordered the beating of his own brother, a cleric aligned with reform. After the disputed 2009 presidential election, in which an apparent reformist victory was thwarted, the streets became the only outlet for dissent.
By all accounts, Khamenei lived modestly. Yet a 2013 Reuters investigation estimated that he controlled assets worth $95 billion through a network of foundations and holdings. In a country where a government ministry reported in 2023 that more than half the population was malnourished, such figures fueled resentment. Bloomberg reported in January that his 56-year-old son Mojtaba, long viewed as a potential successor, owned more than $100 million in luxury properties abroad. The IRGC controls roughly 30 percent of Iran’s economy, according to one of its founders, Mohsen Sazegara, now an exiled dissident. When a new airport opened outside Tehran in 2004, the Guards asserted control by rolling tanks onto its runways. They dominate major sectors of industry and oversee vast smuggling networks.
Over time, power in the Islamic Republic operated like that of a royal court. Khamenei married before the revolution, to a woman whose photograph and even first name were never made public. But through the marriages of his children and siblings, alliances extended into political factions, the clerical hierarchy, and the unelected institutions that ultimately answered to him.
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has written extensively on Khamenei, said he governed Iran “as a cause, not a country.” Historically known as Persia, the country has endured for more than 2,500 years. The cause, however, has been hurting.
Despite years of reports about his declining health, Khamenei did not publicly designate a successor. He was said to have regarded Qasem Soleimani, the charismatic IRGC general, as a son. Until President Trump ordered his killing in a 2020 drone strike, Soleimani was in charge of Iran’s sprawling network of proxy forces, extending from Iraq to Syria, Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon, where Hezbollah long held Israel in a stalemate. Much of that network was weakened after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the military campaigns that followed.
Also gone were the enforcement of Iran’s strict dress code for women, a pillar of the regime; access to oil markets, cut off by a U.S. naval blockade; and, perhaps most consequentially, the country’s air defenses, destroyed in the 12-day war.
The question now is whether the regime survives the death of its master.