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When he appeared in public for the first time in five years in October 2024, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had an uncompromising message: Israel “won’t last long”, he told tens of thousands of supporters at a mosque in Tehran in a Friday sermon.
“We must stand up against the enemy while strengthening our unwavering faith,” the then-84-year-old told the gathering.
Seventeen months later, Khamenei might well have faced his final climactic confrontation after decades of bitter struggle against multiple enemies.
Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that there were many signs indicating Khamenei “is no longer with us”, without explicitly confirming his death.
While there has been no official confirmation of his death from Iranian officials, it is very clear that he was in the crosshairs from the earliest moments of Saturday’s strikes, with satellite imagery showing that his secure compound was heavily damaged in the initial barrage. Iranian authorities have yet to provide proof that he escaped.
Certainly, Israel and the US have made little secret of their keen desire to eliminate Khamenei and so trigger the downfall of the Islamic Republic of Iran in its present form.
Back in October 2024, Khamenei already appeared to have his back to a wall.
Days before, Israel had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran secretary general of Hezbollah, with huge bombs dropped on the militant Islamist movement’s headquarters in Beirut. The assassination was a personal blow to Khamenei, who had known Nasrallah for decades.
The Israeli air offensive against Iran in June last year was another such blow, revealing the weakness of both Iran’s air defences and the coalition of Islamist militias that Khamenei had built up to deter Israel. The Iranian barrage of missiles and drones launched at Israel inflicted some damage but far from enough to stop Israeli attacks. The war ended after Donald Trump dispatched US bombers to strike Iranian nuclear sites, a grave setback to a programme that Iran’s supreme leader had cherished.
That brief conflict revealed that Khamenei had few good options left - a situation this careful, pragmatic, conservative and ruthless revolutionary always sought to avoid.
Born the son of a minor cleric of modest means in the eastern Iranian shrine city of Mashhad, Khamenei took his first steps as a radical in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1960s. The then-shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had launched a major reform project largely rejected by the country’s conservative clergy.
As a young religious student in Qom, a centre of theology, Khamenei had soaked in the traditions of Shia Islam and the radical new thinking of the emerging leader of the conservative opposition, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By the late 1960s, Khamenei was running secret missions for Khomeini, who had been exiled, and organising networks of Islamist activism.
Khamenei soaked up other influences, too. Though an avowed aficionado of western literature, particularly Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck, the young activist was steeped in the anti-colonial ideologies of the time and the anti-western sentiment that often went with them. He met thinkers who sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create new ideologies, liked works describing the “westoxification” of his country and translated works by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who would inspire generations of Islamist extremists, into Farsi.
Imprisoned repeatedly by Iran’s feared security services, Khamenei was nonetheless able to take part in the vast protests of 1978 that eventually convinced the shah to flee and allowed Khomeini to return. A protege of the implacable cleric, he swiftly rose up the hierarchy of the radical regime that seized power, and by 1981, after surviving an assassination attempt that deprived him of the use of an arm, he had won election to the largely ceremonial post of president.
When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was selected as his successor, once the constitution changed to allow someone of lesser clerical qualifications to take on the role and with much greater powers than before. Khamenei swiftly deployed these to consolidate his control over the sprawling and fragmented apparatus of Iran’s post-revolutionary state.
One key power base was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the beating activist heart of the new regime and a powerful military, social and economic force. But Khamenei, as ever, was careful to find other powerful allies and clients, too.
Through the 1990s, he further strengthened his grip, eliminating opponents and rewarding those loyal to him. Even poets Khamenei had once professed to admire were targeted by security services. Overseas dissidents were hunted down, and the relationship with Hezbollah, which the IRGC had helped found in the aftermath of the revolution, was reinforced.
At all times, he followed his strategy of pragmatically advancing the inflexible principles of the project bequeathed him by his late mentor.
When in 1997, Mohammad Khatami, a reformist candidate, won the presidency in a landslide, Khamenei allowed him some freedom of action but worked hard and often forcefully to protect the core of the regime and its ideology from any serious challenge.
Khamenei did not, however, stop Khatami reaching out to Washington in an ultimately abortive effort to establish better relations in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and, following Khomenei’s example, forswore weapons of mass destruction.
But he also backed the IRGC’s efforts to bleed US forces in Iraq after their 2003 invasion and extend Iranian influence in the neighbouring country. This marked the further extension of his strategy of relying on proxies to project power across the region and deter and threaten Israel, named “Little Satan” by the revolutionaries in 1979, with the “Great Satan” being the US.
Khamenei was sceptical of the nuclear deal painstakingly negotiated by Iranian officials with the US and others, but he did not oppose its implementation in 2015. Analysts argue over whether he has sought to restrain or encourage hardliners in the IRGC who have pushed for Iran to acquire a bomb.
Successive waves of unrest and reform efforts were met with surges of vicious repression alongside continuing harsh treatment of measures targeting women, gay people and religious minorities. This, along with deteriorating economic circumstances, disillusioned many erstwhile supporters of the regime and broadened existing unrest. A pressure cooker of discontent was building.
Overseas, Khamenei chose to invest heavily in the so-called axis of resistance – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen and a motley assortment of Islamic militant militias in Syria and Iraq. This may have seemed a clever tactic but it collapsed under the weight of Israeli attacks following the outbreak of war in Gaza, while Iran’s historic alliance with Damascus was ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December.
On Saturday, as US and Israeli jets and missiles pounded Iran, striking Khamenei’s offices and perhaps killing him, Hezbollah’s new leadership offered rhetorical support to Iran, but nothing else. There is little Hamas can do to help, and the Houthis seem frozen.
Thus weakened, Khamenei has spent the last months facing spiralling crisis.
During his more than three decades in power, Khamenei sought to navigate the pressures of conflicting forces within Iran, to avoid outright war and to preserve Khomeini’s legacy – as well as his own power and that of his immediate loyalists, of course.
On the international scene, it is possible to detect evidence of some remaining pragmatism. Faced with the huge military power of the US and Donald Trump’s demands for massive concessions that would strip away the last defences of his regime, Iran’s supreme leader played for time, offering at least some concessions to forestall immediate attack. Domestically, it was the hardline ideologue, not the master tactician, who took centre stage as he sent police and paramilitary thugs to bloodily crush the biggest wave of internal protest and unrest since the 1970 revolution that set him on his way to power.
In the run-up to the US and Israeli attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessed that even if Iran’s supreme leader were killed in the operation, he would probably be replaced by hardline figures from the IRGC, the most powerful military force within the country and the most ideologically committed to continuing what they consider the values and project of the 1979 revolution, two sources told Reuters last week.
For a long time, Khamenei has been ailing, prompting feverish speculation over a successor. The end of his long career has made his many failings and many challenges manifest. Dead or alive, it looks now that Khamenei’s brutal balancing is over.
