Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: The leader who shaped Iran’s defiance
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed in an attack by Israel and the United States. He was 86.
Iranian state media confirmed the death in the early hours on Sunday after US President Donald Trump said that Khamenei had been killed in a joint US-Israeli air strike that hit his compound on Saturday.
“It is announced to the Iranian people that His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Leader of the Islamic Revolution, was martyred in the joint attack launched by America and the Zionist regime on the morning of Saturday, February 28,” Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported. Iranian state media said that Khamenei’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson were also killed.
Trump said earlier that Khamenei and other Iranian officials ”couldn’t escape US intelligence and the advanced tracking systems”.
Khamenei took the helm in Iran in 1989, following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the charismatic leader who had spearheaded the Islamic revolution a decade earlier.
While Khomeini was the ideological force behind the revolution that ended the rule of the Pahlavi monarchy, it was Khamenei who shaped the military and paramilitary apparatus that forms both Iran’s defence against its enemies and provides it with influence well beyond its borders.
Before becoming the supreme leader, he had led Iran as president through a bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s. The grinding conflict, coupled with a sense of isolation among many Iranians as Western countries backed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, deepened Khamenei’s distrust of the West, generally, and the US, in particular, analysts say.
The early years
Born in 1939 in the holy Shia city of Mashhad in northeast Iran, Khamenei was the son of a renowned Muslim leader and ethnic Azerbaijani from neighbouring Iraq. The family first settled in Tabriz in northwestern Iran before moving to Mashhad, a place favoured by religious pilgrims, where Khamenei’s father led an Azerbaijani mosque.
