DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dramatically remolded Iran during more than three decades as supreme leader, turning it into a regional powerhouse and bringing it increasingly into confrontation with Israel and the United States.
His dayslong funeral begins Saturday, months after being killed at the start of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Khamenei took the reins after the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery
ideologue who led the overthrow of the shah and installed rule by Shiite Muslim clerics. It fell to Khamenei, a stodgier figure with weaker religious credentials, to turn that revolutionary vision into a state establishment.
He supported myriad armed groups in the Middle East, pushed ahead with Iran’s nuclear program, and faced down several protest movements with crackdowns. While his clashes with the U.S. and Israel were a source of support at home, they ultimately led to his demise.
After the 1980s war with Iraq, Khamenei turned 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, with hands across Iran’s economic sectors.
Under Khamenei’s reign, Iran also shifted fully from conventional warfare to support for proxies, building the “Axis of Resistance.”
That included backing the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which drove Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000 and has battled Israeli forces repeatedly since.
Iran has also supported Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who in 2014 seized the country’s capital and held on for over a decade in a stalemated war, and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has fought Israel in the Gaza Strip. Iranian-backed militias also waged an insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq.
The Mideast wars sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, however, set in motion the collapse of that “Axis of Resistance," and left Hamas and Hezbollah weaker.
For decades, Khamenei 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 a 2015 nuclear deal, Iran agreed to drastically reduce its stockpile and enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. But since U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew Washington from the accord in 2018, a move welcomed by Israel, Iran has accumulated a stockpile of uranium enriched to nearly weapons-grade levels. Israel and some U.S. officials have expressed concern that Tehran could us that to pursue nuclear arms if it chose.
Both the U.S.-Israeli bombing in 2025 and the current war have targeted Iran's nuclear program.
Political repression and Iran's faltering economy have fueled successively bigger waves of protests.
In 2009, protests broke out when the reformist opposition claimed the reelection victory of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was rigged. Dozens were killed and hundreds arrested in a crackdown.
Economic protests broke out in 2017 and demonstrations escalated in 2019 over a rise in government-set gasoline prices. A crackdown killed over 300 people, according to activists.
Protests erupted again in 2022 over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained for not wearing her headscarf properly. More than 500 people were killed and tens of thousands arrested when security forces crushed the demonstrations.
In late 2025, economic protests erupted and grew into what appeared to be the biggest protest movement ever. Hundreds of thousands across the country took to the streets, demanding an end to the Islamic Republic. The ferocity of the crackdown — activists say at least 7,000 have been killed — stunned Iranians.
Khamenei’s death raises questions about the future of the Islamic Republic. Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was chosen as the next supreme leader. But he was believed to have been wounded in the strikes that killed his father and has not been seen publicly.
As Trump launched the current war, he called on Iranians to “take over your government. ” There has been no sign yet of any such uprising, however, as hard-liners have rallied nightly in the streets of Tehran.
What happens after the burial of the elder Khamenei may depend greatly on bodies like the Revolutionary Guard, which has repeatedly shown its willingness to use overwhelming force to maintain power.
