WASHINGTON: The 36-year rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei constructed Iran into a strong anti-United States power, spreading its army sway throughout the Center East, whereas utilizing an iron fist to crush repeated unrest at house.
He was killed on Saturday, aged 86, Iranian state media introduced, in air strikes by Israel and the US that pulverised his central Tehran compound, after many years of efforts to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme diplomatically failed.
At first dismissed as weak and indecisive, Khamenei appeared an unlikely alternative for supreme chief after the dying of the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who based the Islamic Republic of Iran. However Khamenei’s rise to the head of the nation’s energy construction afforded him a decent grip over the nation’s affairs.
Khamenei was “an accident of historical past” who went from “a weak president to an initially weak supreme chief to one of many 5 strongest Iranians of the final 100 years”, Karim Sadjadpour on the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace instructed Reuters.
The ayatollah criticised Washington all through his rule, persevering with to deploy barbs after the beginning of Donald Trump’s second time period as US president in 2025.
As a brand new wave of protests unfold by Iran, with slogans corresponding to “Demise to the dictator”, and as Trump threatened to intervene, Khamenei vowed in January that the nation wouldn’t “yield to the enemy”.
The remark was typical of the ferociously anti-Western Khamenei, in workplace since 1989.
By sustaining the hardline stance of Khomeini, the Republic’s first supreme chief, Khamenei quashed the ambitions of a succession of independent-minded elected presidents who sought extra open insurance policies at house and overseas.
Within the course of, he ensured Iran’s isolation, critics say.
HIS WORD WAS LAW
Khamenei lengthy denied that Iran’s nuclear programme was aimed toward producing an atomic weapon, because the West contended.
In 2015, he cautiously supported a nuclear deal between world powers and the federal government of pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani that curbed the nation’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions aid. The hard-won accord resulted in a partial lifting of Iran’s financial and political isolation.
However Khamenei’s hostility towards the US was undimmed, intensifying in 2018 when Trump’s first administration withdrew from the nuclear settlement and reimposed sanctions to choke Iran’s oil and transport industries.
Following the US withdrawal, Khamenei sided with hardline supporters who criticised Rouhani’s coverage of appeasement in direction of the West.
As Trump pressed Iran to conform to a brand new nuclear deal in 2025, Khamenei condemned “the impolite and conceited leaders of America”. “Who’re you to resolve whether or not Iran ought to have enrichment?” he requested.
Khamenei typically denounced “the Nice Devil” in speeches, reassuring hardliners for whom anti-US sentiment was on the coronary heart of the 1979 revolution, which compelled the final shah of Iran into exile.
Iran noticed main student-led protests in 1999 and 2002. However Khamenei’s authority was put to the check extra profoundly in 2009, when the contested outcomes of a presidential election that he had validated ignited violent avenue unrest, stoking a disaster of legitimacy that lingered till his dying.
In 2022, Khamenei cracked down on protesters enraged by the death of Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, 22, who died within the custody of morality police in September of that 12 months.
Confronted with a few of the most intense turmoil for the reason that revolution, Khamenei blamed Western enemies after which resorted to the hanging of protesters and the show of their our bodies, suspended from cranes, after months of unrest.
Iranians received the message.
