TEHRAN — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who commanded the Islamic Republic of Iran for 36 years and shaped its defiant posture toward the West, was killed Saturday during the opening salvo of a sweeping joint US and Israeli military campaign targeting the country’s nuclear infrastructure, military leadership, and seat of power.
President Donald Trump announced Khamenei’s death, a declaration swiftly confirmed by Iranian state television. Khamenei was 86 years old — the same age at which his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in 1989.
Khamenei’s Tehran headquarters was among the first targets struck. Satellite imagery revealed significant damage to the compound. A source indicated that Khamenei had been transferred in advance to a secure location outside the capital, though the strikes ultimately proved fatal. An Israeli official confirmed that eliminating Khamenei had been an explicit objective of the operation.
The strikes also hit three key Iranian nuclear facilities and targeted the country’s ballistic missile arsenal and senior military commanders. Iran responded by launching barrages of missiles toward Israeli cities, signalling that the conflict, despite the decapitation of its supreme leadership, was far from over.
The death of Khamenei removes the only figure to have held the title of supreme leader since Ayatollah Khomeini established the Islamic Republic following the 1979 revolution. Iran has had just two supreme leaders in nearly five decades — a measure of how thoroughly Khamenei had become synonymous with the state itself.
Born in Mashhad, north-eastern Iran, in 1939, Khamenei was the second of eight children raised in a religious Shia household. His father was a mid-ranking cleric, and Khamenei himself qualified as a cleric by the age of 11. His political awakening came under the Shah’s rule, during which he was arrested six times by the secret police.
After the revolution, Khomeini appointed him as Friday prayer leader of Tehran, a position of enormous symbolic authority. His rise was nearly cut short in June 1981, when a dissident group concealed a bomb inside a tape recorder that detonated during one of his lectures. Khamenei survived but permanently lost the use of his right arm. Later that year, President Mohammad-Ali Rajai was assassinated, and Khamenei won the subsequent presidential election with 97 percent of the vote.
He assumed the supreme leadership in 1989 following Khomeini’s death, and over three decades methodically built an interlocking web of loyalists across parliament, the judiciary, the police, the media, and the clerical establishment. That architecture of control allowed him to weather repeated challenges — student protests in 1999, the mass uprising that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election, and the 2019 street demonstrations over fuel prices, which he suppressed by shutting down the internet entirely.
The most severe domestic crisis of his final years erupted in 2022, when Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, died in police custody after being accused of improperly wearing her hijab. The protests that followed were met with a brutal crackdown; human rights groups documented more than 550 deaths and 20,000 detentions.
By January 2026, a fresh wave of unrest — driven by economic collapse — had engulfed the country. Human rights organisations recorded at least 6,488 protesters killed and 53,700 detained in the crackdown that followed, the deadliest suppression of dissent in the Islamic Republic’s history.
On the international stage, Khamenei’s tenure was defined by confrontation with the United States and Israel. President George W. Bush named Iran part of an "Axis of Evil" following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Khamenei issued a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons un-Islamic, yet Iran’s uranium enrichment programme became the central flashpoint of his later years. A landmark nuclear deal reached in 2015 offered sanctions relief in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, but Trump abandoned the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sweeping sanctions. Two years later, Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guards‘ most powerful general, in Iraq.
In June 2025, Israeli forces struck Iran directly, targeting its nuclear programme, missile stockpiles, and military commanders. Iran retaliated with missile barrages against Israeli cities. The United States then entered the conflict, striking three Iranian nuclear facilities. Through it all, Khamenei refused to abandon uranium enrichment. At the end of January 2026, he issued a stark warning: if Americans started a war, it would become a regional war.
That war arrived on Saturday. With Khamenei dead, Iran faces a leadership vacuum unlike anything in its post-revolutionary history. The Assembly of Experts holds the constitutional authority to select a successor, but whether that body can convene, deliberate, or function amid active strikes and internal chaos remains profoundly uncertain. The Islamic Republic, built around the singular authority of the supreme leader, now confronts an existential question its founders never fully anticipated.
