Background and career
Ali Hosseini Khamenei (19 April 1939 – 28 February 2026) was an Iranian politician and Shia cleric who served as the supreme leader of Iran from 1989 until his assassination by Israeli airstrikes in 2026. The patriarch of the Khamenei family prior to his death, Khamenei had previously served as the president of Iran from 1981 to 1989. His 36-year tenure makes him Iran's longest-serving supreme leader. Born in Mashhad to the Khamenei family, he studied at a hawza there before settling in Qom in 1958, where he attended the classes of Ruhollah Khomeini. Khamenei became involved in opposition to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and was arrested six times before being exiled for three years by the Pahlavi government. Khamenei was a mainstream figure in the Iranian Revolution, and upon its success, held many posts in the newly established Islamic republic. In the aftermath of the revolution, he was the target of an attempted assassination that paralysed his right arm. Khamenei served as the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989 during the Iran–Iraq War, when he also developed close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). After the death of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei was elected supreme leader by the Assembly of Experts. During the deliberations, Khamenei expressed reservations about his own religious qualifications and suitability for the position, as he was a mid-ranking cleric and did not meet the constitutional requirement of marja'. The constitution was subsequently amended to remove that requirement, and the Assembly reconfirmed his leadership later that year. As supreme leader, Khamenei supported Iran's nuclear program for civilian use while issuing a fatwa forbidding the production of weapons of mass destruction. In 2015, Khamenei endorsed the Iran nuclear deal, which restricted Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief, but the agreement unraveled after the United States withdrew from it in 2018. He favoured economic privatization of Iranian state-owned industries and, using its oil and gas reserves, transformed Iran into an "energy superpower". His foreign policy centered on Shia Islamism and exporting the Islamic Revolution. Khamenei played a pivotal role in shaping Iran's military and paramilitary apparatus following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, especially the IRGC, transforming it into a primary tool for domestic control and regional influence, in turn making Iran a regional power. Under Khamenei, Iran supported the Axis of Resistance coalition in the Syrian civil war, the War in Iraq, the Yemeni civil war, and the Gaza war, as well as Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian war. A staunch critic of Israel and of Zionism, Khamenei supported the Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; his rhetoric included calls for Israel's destruction and antisemitic tropes. Under Khamenei, Iran was involved in proxy wars with Israel and Saudi Arabia. In 2025 and 2026, tensions with Israel and the United States escalated into the Twelve-Day War and an ongoing conflict, during the latter of which Khamenei was assassinated. The Assembly of Experts elected his son Mojtaba as successor on 8 March. Khamenei's state funeral took place from 3 July to 9 July and drew millions from across Iran. His decades in power were marked by the development of a strong personality cult, which he actively promoted, as well as by his ability to appoint loyalists to key positions across Iran's political and state institutions. His authority was highly centralized, with loyalty to him expected from senior officials. During his tenure, Iran's economy experienced periods of stagnation and decline, while substantial financial resources were allocated to the country's nuclear program. The program contributed to tensions with Western powers and eventually resulted in international sanctions that placed significant pressure on Iran's economy. Identified as a pragmatic hardliner, Khamenei sidelined leftist factions, moderate clerics, and political dissidents, while occasionally easing restrictions when the regime's stability or legitimacy had been threatened. His leadership was closely associated with the expansion of state militarization and the consolidation of power within the office of the supreme leader. His critics characterized him as an authoritarian responsible for political repression, state-sanctioned violence, and other injustices. Journalists, activists, and other individuals were persecuted for actions including insulting the supreme leader, sometimes alongside blasphemy charges, with penalties ranging from imprisonment to corporal punishment. There were numerous major protests under his rule, including in 1999, 2009, 2017–2018, 2018–2019, 2022–2023, and 2025–2026.
Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamaneh was born on 19 April 1939 to Javad Khamenei, an alim and mujtahid born in Najaf, Iraq, and his second wife Khadijeh Mirdamadi (daughter of Hashem Mirdamadi) in Mashhad. He was the sixth of eight children, the third born to his mother. Two of his brothers are also clerics; his younger brother, Hadi Khamenei, is a newspaper editor and cleric. His elder sister Fatemeh Hosseini Khamenei died in 2015, aged 89. His father was an ethnic Azerbaijani Turk from Khamaneh. His mother was an ethnic Persian from Yazd. Ali Khamenei's ancestor was Sayyid Hossein Tafreshi, a descendant of the Aftasi Sayyids supposedly reaching to Sultan ul-Ulama Ahmad, known as Sultan Sayyid, a grandchild of the fourth Imam of Shia Islam, Ali al-Sajjad. Some of his ancestors are from Tafresh in today's Markazi Province and migrated from their original home in Tafresh to Khamaneh near Tabriz. Khamenei's education began at the age of four, by learning the Quran at Maktab; he spent his basic and advanced levels of seminary studies at the hawza of Mashhad, under mentors such as Sheikh Hashem Qazvini and Ayatollah Milani.
In Mashhad, Khamenei frequented secular intellectuals as well as the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists, a political organization that advocated Islamic socialism and was influenced by figures such as Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Tito and Ali Shariati; Khamenei partook in their seminars and sermons, which for Abbas Milani would influence his later Third Worldism. In 1957, he went to Najaf, but soon returned to Mashhad due to his father's unwillingness to let him stay there. In 1958, he settled in Qom, where he attended the classes of Husayn Burujardi and Ruhollah Khomeini. Like many other politically active clerics at the time, Khamenei was far more involved with politics than religious scholarship. Khamenei would later describe his upbringing in autobiographical reflections as having been raised in a deeply religious household. He stated that his mother came from a clerical family, and that religious education shaped his childhood. He recalled excelling in his studies, reciting the Quran at school, and developing an early interest in hadith and prophetic narratives. He described family gatherings in which his mother recited Quranic verses, particularly those concerning the lives of the prophets. He emphasized his broad intellectual interests beyond religious scholarship, including mathematics, geography, and especially history. As an adolescent, Khamenei read widely in literature, poetry, and novels, became familiar with major works of Persian poetry, and began composing poetry at a young age. He characterized himself as having a strong memory and an aptitude for literary criticism, stating that he could recall texts read in adolescence and that his critiques of poetry were often affirmed by poets and audiences. He recounted that during the Pahlavi era, he once jumped from a moving train to perform his prayers on time. He described his childhood as marked by poverty, noting that his family lived in a poor neighborhood of Mashhad, his mother made clothes from his father's old garments, and that they at times lacked sufficient food, relying on small amounts of raisins or milk purchased with minor sums provided by relatives.
Khamenei first became politically active in the 1960s and 70s amid opposition to the Shah's reign. During that time, he taught at a religious school in Birjand. According to Khamenei's official website, the Shah's intelligence agency, SAVAK, arrested him six times between 1963 and 1976–the first time following the 1963 demonstrations against Ruhollah Khomeini's arrest. Later, restrictions were imposed on his public activities before he was exiled in 1976 for three years until the end of the Shah's reign. Khamenei was a key figure in the Iranian Revolution and a close confidant of Ruhollah Khomeini. From the founding of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei held many government posts. He served as head of the servants of Astan Quds Razavi from 14 April 1979. Muhammad Sahimi wrote that Khamenei's political career began after the 1979 Iranian Revolution; he also wrote that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, later president of Iran, brought Khamenei into Khomeini's inner circle. Later on, Hassan Rouhani, then a member of Parliament, arranged for Khamenei to get his first major post in the provisional revolutionary government as deputy defense minister. In 1980, after the resignation of Hussein-Ali Montazeri, Ayatollah Khomeini appointed Ali Khamenei to the position of Tehran's Friday Prayers Imam. Khamenei was briefly the Vice Minister of National Defence from late July to 6 November 1979 and served as a supervisor of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. He also served on the battlefield as a representative of the Iranian Parliament's Defense Commission.
Khamenei narrowly escaped assassination by the Mujahedin-e Khalq when a bomb, concealed in a tape recorder, exploded beside him. On 27 June 1981, while Khamenei had returned from the frontline, he went to the Aboozar Mosque according to his Saturday schedule. After the first prayer, he lectured to worshippers who had written their questions on paper. During the event, a young man posing as a journalist – described as "of medium height, curly hair, beard and chequered coat" placed a tape recorder on the desk in front of Khamenei and pressed a button on the device. After about a minute, the recorder began whistling and then suddenly exploded. "A gift of Furqan Group to the Islamic Republic" was written on the inner wall of the tape recorder. Khamenei's treatment took several months and his arm, vocal cords and lungs were seriously injured. He was permanently injured, losing the use of his right arm.
In 1981, after the assassination of Mohammad-Ali Rajai, Khamenei was elected President of Iran by a landslide vote (97%) in the October 1981 Iranian presidential election in which only four candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians. Khamenei became the first cleric to hold office. Ruhollah Khomeini had originally wanted to keep clerics out of the presidency, but later changed his views. In the 1985 Iranian presidential election, where only three candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians, Ali Khamenei was reelected as President of Iran, receiving 87% of the votes. In his presidential inaugural address, Khamenei vowed to eliminate "deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists". According to the Iran Chamber, vigorous opposition to the government, including nonviolent and violent protest, assassinations, guerrilla activity and insurrections, was answered by state repression and terror in the early 1980s, both before and during Khamenei's presidency. Thousands of rank-and-file members of insurgent groups were killed, often by revolutionary courts. By 1982, the government announced that the courts would be reined in, although various political groups continued to be repressed by the government in the first half of the 1980s.
