US and Israeli forces recently announced the killing of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian politician and Shia cleric who served as Iran’s supreme leader from 1989 until his assassination in 2026. He was killed on February 28 during a joint US-Israeli raid on his compound in Tehran, the Iranian capital. The operation followed strikes that Israel said were the result of months of joint planning. ALSO READ: RwandAir suspends Middle East flights amid US-Iran escalation Washington has accused Tehran of attempting to revive its nuclear programme after earlier US strikes, an allegation Iran denies, insisting its nuclear activities are peaceful. Khamenei, 86 at the time of his death, was not only Iran’s top political authority but also its highest-ranking religious leader. Over nearly four decades, he consolidated sweeping powers within the Islamic Republic, positioning Iran as a regional force and bringing it into repeated confrontation with the United States and Israel over its nuclear ambitions. His tenure was also marked by bloody crackdowns on anti-government protests. But who was he? Born into a religious family in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Khamenei came of age during opposition to the Western-backed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Like many leaders of the Islamic Republic, he studied at the seminary in Qom in the early 1960s. ALSO READ: Qatar, Saudi condemn Iranian missile strikes in region He joined the anti-shah movement and spent periods in prison and in hiding. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he was appointed to the Revolutionary Council. In 1981, he became Iran’s third president. That same year, he survived a bombing that left his right hand paralysed. Following the death of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei was chosen to succeed him. Unlike Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic Revolution, Khamenei lacked fiery rhetoric or towering charisma, but he steered Iran through the aftermath of the 1980–88 war with Iraq and remained in power for more than three decades, becoming the Middle East’s longest-serving head of state at the time of his death. To loyalists, his authority was second only to the divine. Over the years, he built a vast network of clerics and state institutions that ultimately answered to him. ALSO READ: African Union cautions against wider instability after US-Iran tensions Under Khamenei’s reign, Iran shifted fully from conventional warfare to support for proxies, building the so-called Axis of Resistance to advance its interests in the region. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, established with Iran’s help in the 1980s, drove Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000 and battled it to a stalemate in the monthlong 2006 war. Elsewhere, suspected Iranian-backed militants bombed a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 people. Iran also was allegedly linked to the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 members of the U.S. military. Iran denied responsibility for both attacks. After his death, an 88-member Assembly of Experts, largely made up of conservative clerics, is responsible for selecting his successor, but no clear frontrunner has emerged.
