DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who assembled theocratic power in Iran over the decades as its supreme leader and sought to turn it into a regional powerhouse, bringing it into confrontation with Israel and the United States over its nuclear program while crushing democracy protesters at home, has died. He was 86.
Iranian state media reported the death early Sunday, after a major attack launched by Israel and the United States.
U.S. President Donald Trump said hours earlier that Khamenei had been killed in the joint operation.
Khamenei dramatically remolded the Islamic Republic since he took the reins after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Khomeini was the fiery, charismatic ideologue who led the overthrow of the shah and installed rule by Shiite Muslim clerics tasked with spreading religious purity. It fell to Khamenei, a stodgier figure with weaker religious credentials and a leaden demeanor, to turn that revolutionary vision into a state establishment.
He ended up ruling far longer than Khomeini. He greatly expanded the Shiite clerical class and built the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard into the most important body underpinning his rule. The Guard became a military and business behemoth, the country’s most elite force and head of its ballistic missile arsenal, with hands across Iran’s economic sectors.
But the strains became harder to contain. Political repression and the faltering economy fueled successively bigger waves of mass protests. Anger over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, detained for not wearing her mandatory headscarf properly, escalated into demonstrations against social restrictions. In early January, hundreds of thousands marched in cities across the country, many chanting, “Death to Khamenei.”
Khamenei responded with the deadliest crackdown seen in nearly 50 years of clerical rule as security forces opened fire on crowds, killing thousands.
At the same time, the Mideast wars sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel set in motion the collapse of the regionwide “Axis of Resistance” built by Khamenei. Israel and Iran attacked each other directly for the first time in 2024. I srael struck Iran again in June 2025, as it and the United States targeted the country’s nuclear program and killed top military officers and nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated by sending missiles and drones at Israel.
Khamenei’s death raises questions about the future of the Islamic Republic.
The 88-seat Assembly of Experts, a group of mostly hard-line clerics, will choose Khamenei’s replacement. But no clear successor is in place.
As he launched the bombing in February, U.S. President Donald Trump called on Iranians to “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” What happens next may depend greatly on bodies like the Revolutionary Guard, which has repeatedly shown its willingness to use overwhelming force to keep power even as many of Iran’s 90 million people grow disenchanted.
“Culturally, the government is bankrupt,” said Mehdi Khalaji, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in 2017. “The ideology of the Islamic Republic did not work at all.”
Ali Khamenei was born into a religious family in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad, a hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the struggle against the Western-allied shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Like many other Iranian leaders, he studied under Khomeini at the seminary in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, in the early 1960s, before the Khomeini's exile to Iraq and France.
Khamenei joined the anti-shah movement, facing time in both prison and in hiding. When Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph in February 1979 and proclaimed the Islamic Republic, Khamenei was appointed to the secretive Revolutionary Council. In 1981, he was elected Iran's third president; that same year, a bombing by opponents left him with one hand paralyzed.
With his thick, heavy-framed glasses, Khamenei lacked the steely gaze and fiery aura of Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution. He fell far short of Khomeini’s religious scholarship, holding the relatively low rank of “hojatolislam” in the Shiite clerical hierarchy.
After being named supreme leader after Khomeini's death, he bounded overnight to the level of grand ayatollah, at the top of the hierarchy, and for years had to deal with skepticism over his credentials.
Khamenei acknowledged the doubts with humility. “I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian,” he said in his first speech in his new post.
Despite his lack of charisma, Khamenei stabilized Iran after the 1980s war with Iraq and governed for over three decades — far longer than Khomeini.
Hard-liners considered him second only to God in his authority. Khamenei created an ever-growing bureaucracy of Shiite clerics and governmental agencies that blurred responsibilities and left him as the ultimate arbiter. As Iran questioned whether to keep the Revolutionary Guard after the war with Iraq, Khamenei came to its rescue and allowed the paramilitary force to gain a powerful grip on Iran’s economy. He also used a system of appointees to undercut the civilian government elected by its people.
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.
Through Hezbollah, Iran perfected a strategy of making local militant groups its allies to project power — often through violence. Iran followed that model when backing Yemen's Houthi rebels, who in 2014 seized the country's capital, Sanaa, and held on for over a decade in a stalemated war in the Arab world's poorest nation — despite facing a Saudi-led coalition and later, U.S.-led airstrikes over their attacks in the Red Sea corridor.
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.
Iran emerged as a prime beneficiary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which replaced its main regional threat, Saddam Hussein, with a friendly Shiite-led government. Iranian-backed militias waged a brutal insurgency against U.S. forces and embedded themselves within the country's political landscape.
Khamenei used the Guard's expeditionary Quds Force most successfully after the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Guard troops advised Shiite militias, the best fighters in Iraq, and gave crucial support to President Assad in Syria’s civil war.
That secured Assad for a decade, until the chaos sparked by Hamas' attack on Israel in 2023. Israel devastated the Gaza Strip and launched airstrikes and ground operations pulverizing Hamas, which Iran had armed and funded for years. Israel is widely believed to have killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an operation in Tehran in 2024, further embarrassing the Islamic Republic.
Hezbollah found its ranks targeted by exploding pagers and an Israeli campaign killed its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah. Then, in December 2024, rebel fighters toppled Assad in an offensive in Syria, ending a half-century of his family's autocratic rule.
The supreme leader remained deeply suspicious of the U.S., referring to it as the “Great Satan” even after President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, offering dialogue and a fresh start.
He shrugged off U.N. sanctions and pushed ahead with Iran’s nuclear program, which the U.S. and its allies say hid a secret project to build a nuclear weapon up until 2003. Khamenei issued a verbal fatwa, or religious ruling, that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, but vowed the country would never give up its right to develop what he called a peaceful nuclear energy program.
Under Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Tehran agreed to drastically reduce its stockpile and enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. But only three years later, Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew Washington from the accord, arguing it didn't go far enough.
Iran has since broken all the limits of the nuclear deal and accumulated a stockpile of uranium enriched to nearly weapons-grade levels, now large enough to pursue several nuclear weapons if it chose to do so. Diplomatic efforts to restore the deal under President Joe Biden stalled.
In a March 2011 speech, Khamenei used toppled Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who had given up his own nuclear program years earlier, as an example of why Iran’s nuclear program remained so important in the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals in the Middle East.
“Just the way you give a lollipop to a child, Westerners gave ‘incentives’ to them and they gave up everything,” Khamenei said.
Khamenei's first major challenge came in 1997, when pro-reform politicians gained control of parliament and cleric Mohammad Khatami was elected president by a landslide, riding a large youth vote. The reformists demanded a loosening of the strict social rules imposed by the revolution and called for improved ties with the outside world, including the U.S.
Khamenei-backed hard-liners moved to contain the liberal movement, fearing it would eventually call for an end to clerical rule. Khamenei stopped parliament from loosening restrictions on the media in an unusually overt intervention. Clerical bodies blocked other key liberal legislation and banned many reformist lawmakers from running for reelection, ensuring a return of hard-liner control in the 2004 elections.
That set the stage for the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and his disputed reelection in 2009 amid charges of vote-rigging. Mass protests broke out, posing the greatest threat in decades to Iran’s clerical leadership. The Revolutionary Guard, Basij militia and police unleashed a crackdown in which dozens were killed and hundreds arrested.
The turmoil, and reports of protesters being tortured to death or raped in prison, dealt a severe blow to Khamenei’s prestige.
As sanctions bit further, popular unrest rose. Economic protests broke out in 2017 and demonstrations escalated in 2019 over a rise in government-set gasoline prices. A bloody crackdown that followed killed over 300 people, according to activists.
Although Khamenei struggled to preserve the ideological purity of the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s government has largely failed to rid the country of Western influence. Satellite dishes, banned in theory, crowd Tehran’s rooftops. Banned social media sites are widely used, even by some prominent politicians, despite being blocked.
Protests erupted again in 2022 over the death of Amini, a young woman detained for not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. More than 500 people were killed and tens of thousands arrested when security forces crushed the demonstrations again.
In late December 2025, new economic protests erupted and would grow into what appeared to be the biggest protest movement ever. Hundreds of thousands across the country took to the streets, overtly demanding an end to the Islamic Republic. Some even chanted for the return of the shah's son, living in exile since 1979. The ferocity of the crackdown stunned Iranians.
With U.S. President Donald Trump, Khamenei faced a more aggressive and unpredictable American drive to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018, bringing a return of sanctions.
The two sides came close to war with the United States after an American drone strike killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. At Soleimani’s mass funeral that drew millions to the streets, Khamenei wept over the casket of the man he once called a “living martyr.” Two days later, the Guard mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner after its takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard.
Iran ramped uranium enrichment back up, reaching 60% purity — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Still, when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Khamenei resumed talks, underscoring the deep toll the sanctions had taken. Iran’s long-ailing economy entered a freefall worsening domestic unrest.
But a deal remained elusive. In June 2025, Israel and the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, inflicting heavy damage, though how far back it set the program remained unclear.
During the crackdown on nationwide protests in January, Trump renewed threats to strike, demanding Iran make major concessions at the negotiating table. Then came three rounds of indirect talks. Then came Saturday.
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Former Associated Press writer Brian Murphy contributed.
