by Karim Sadjadpour
Mr. Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In June 1989, when Ali Khamenei was elevated to the position of supreme leader of Iran, he let slip the sense of insecurity that would come to define his brutal 37-year reign.
“I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings,” he said in his inaugural address, and “truly a minor seminarian.” It was, at the time, an accurate self-assessment for a mid-ranking cleric in the hierarchical world of Shiite Islam.
Over the next four decades, this seemingly unqualified cleric who rose to the top almost by chance would become one of the world’s longest-serving autocrats, confounding every American president since George H.W. Bush. He would at one point become the most powerful man in the Middle East, dominating five failing lands — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza. This ambition and hubris also eventually led to his downfall. He came to govern with the hypervigilance and brutality of a man driven by the idea that much of his own society and the world’s greatest superpower sought to unseat him — which, in the end, it did. President Trump announced on social media that Ayatollah Khamenei was killed on Saturday. He was 86.
Ayatollah Khamenei’s ideology as a leader was simple and immovable. Resistance against “global arrogance” — what he called American imperialism — informed his belief system and his strategic doctrine. The reformist president Mohammad Khatami once told me that Ayatollah Khamenei believed the Islamic Republic required enmity with America. Under the Ayatollah’s stewardship, the regime’s enduring slogans — “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but not “Long Live Iran” — made clear that its priority was defiance, not development.
Ali Khamenei was born in 1939 in the northeastern shrine city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a cleric of Azeri origin. He often romanticized his austere upbringing, saying he frequently ate “bread and raisins” for dinner. Enrolled in religious education by age 5, he spent his formative years in Mashhad’s seminary before a brief stint in Najaf and later Qom. He never legitimately attained the senior religious credentials of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He was made an Ayatollah overnight upon succession — a source of insecurity that would shape the rest of his career.
While studying in Qom in his early 20s, he fell under the spell of Mr. Khomeini, then a fringe firebrand whose defiance of the shah attracted devoted seminarians. When the shah exiled Mr. Khomeini in 1964, Mr. Khamenei stayed behind, disseminating his mentor’s teachings on Islamic government. He was arrested six times by the shah’s secret police, Savak, reportedly enduring solitary confinement and torture. Those who knew him speculated that his hatred of Israel and America was forged in those cells, given the widespread belief at that time that Savak was trained by the C.I.A. and Mossad.
When the 1979 revolution deposed the shah — ending 2,500 years of monarchy in Iran — Ayatollah Khomeini triumphantly returned from exile, and Mr. Khamenei was soon catapulted from obscurity, becoming president of the nascent Islamic Republic.
When Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989, shortly after agreeing to a cease-fire to end a brutal eight-year war with Iraq, he left hundreds of thousands of casualties, tens of billions in economic devastation and no clear successors. Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was then speaker of parliament, helped secure Mr. Khamenei’s succession, mistakenly believing the then-50-year-old cleric would be his subordinate; the rivalry between them endured for nearly three decades. Ayatollah Khamenei buried Mr. Rafsanjani both politically and literally, when the latter died in January 2017.
Ayatollah Khamenei projected an image of pious frugality, but was reported to have control of vast wealth built on seized property from Iranians. Under his reign, Iran’s population has been isolated from the global financial system for decades. Its currency was among the world’s most devalued, its passport among the most denied, its internet among the most censored. Brain drain became one of Iran’s top exports as some 150,000 Iranians left the country annually.
Beyond Iran’s borders, Ayatollah Khamenei filled the power vacuums left by the Iraq war and the Arab uprisings, wielding the sword of the military commander Qassim Suleimani — whom Mr. Trump assassinated in January 2020 — to project hard power and the shield of his English-speaking foreign ministers to deflect pressure. While Iranians suffered under backbreaking sanctions and inflation at home, Ayatollah Khamenei spent tens of billions of dollars funding an “axis of resistance” throughout the Middle East. For much of his reign, Iran was embroiled in a three-front war against America, Israel and its own population.
Iranian power in the region peaked on Oct. 7, 2023. Ayatollah Khamenei was one of the lone world leaders to praise Hamas’s attack on Israel, a decision that proved to be a profound miscalculation. In the months that followed, Israel struck devastating blows against Iran’s axis of resistance: the assassination of the Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, and the elimination of Ayatollah Khamenei’s most important ally, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Then, in a 12-day war in June 2025, Israel battered Iranian cities and military installations and assassinated top Revolutionary Guards commanders in their bedrooms and bunkers, paving the way for the United States to drop 14 bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites. After days of silence, Ayatollah Khamenei resurfaced from underground, his voice raspy and his skin pale, to declare victory. It was a spectacle meant to project strength, but instead underscored for the world the regime’s fragility.
Ayatollah Khamenei’s most devastating act of violence was directed inward. In January 2026, as protests over the economy engulfed the country, he ordered what now appears to be the deadliest crackdown in the regime’s history, with estimates ranging from 6,800 citizens killed, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, to as many as 30,000 killed in a 48-hour rampage, according to estimates from two senior officials in Iran’s Ministry of Health, as reported by Time. It was the desperate climax of a decades-long reign of repression — the act of a man who, when cornered, understood no language but force.
Ayatollah Khamenei organized his existence around one big idea: resistance. It sustained him through prison, assassination attempts, sanctions and uprisings. His refusal to adapt sealed his country’s fate. The Islamic Republic’s tenure has, so far, amounted to a lost half-century for Iran. While its Persian Gulf neighbors became global hubs of finance, transport and technology, Iran squandered its wealth on failed regional adventures and a nuclear program that brought only isolation — all the while repressing and wasting its greatest source of wealth: its people.
I re-publish this article, because I thought it was the best profile I had read on the man.
