Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died aged 86 following joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran, plunging the region into further instability.
Donald Trump confirmed Khamenei was killed in the airstrikes overnight, describing him as “one of the most evil people in history” and claiming that now is the “single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country”.
Trump’s confirmation came after a senior Israeli government source told The Independent that the clerical ruler, who has overseen Iran’s transformation into one of the Middle East’s dominant powers since 1989, was killed in a strike that flattened his compound.
Donald Trump confirmed that the US had carried out “major combat operations” in Iran. The Israeli military later said that around 200 warplanes were involved in the attack.
The death of the Ayatollah will leave a vacuum of power in Iran after three decades of rule, with no clear internal successor.
Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the holy city of Mashhad in northeast Iran and raised in a clerical family. His father was a respected scholar and he undertook religious studies at an early age. He would go on to study under prominent clerics, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who became a close confidant.
In the 1960s and 70s, Khamenei entered the arena of politics as a vocal critic of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was arrested several times by government forces, before being exiled in 1964.
The Ayatollah played a key role in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which led to the replacement of the Imperial State of Iran by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
After the revolution, Khamenei returned to Tehran and became President of Iran in 1981. That same year, he survived an assassination attempt when a bomb hidden in a tape recorder exploded beside him during Saturday prayers at the Abuzar Mosque in Tehran. The attack severely injured his right arm.
During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Khamenei consolidated his power and developed close ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, left deep scars on Iranian society. Estimates of total casualties range from 1,000,000 to twice that number, on both sides.
After the death of Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s Assembly of Experts selected Khamenei as Supreme Leader. He went on to rule the country for three times longer than his predecessor and profoundly shaped Iranian society and its foreign policy aims.
The Ayatollah entrenched the system of rule by the “mullahs," or Shiite Muslim clerics. At the same time, he built the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard into the dominant force in Iran’s military and internal politics.
The Supreme Leader ruthlessly crushed dissent during his long rule and resisted any attempts to give more power to Iran’s parliament.
Huge nationwide protests erupted in 2009 over allegations of vote-rigging following the surprising election victory of conservative candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was declared the victor with more than 60 percent of the vote, prompting the opposition to reject the result and gather to protest.
Although the protests were peaceful, police and paramilitary groups were deployed to suppress demonstrators. A handful of protesters and members of the opposition were killed. Protests continued for the rest of the year, with hundreds killed or thrown in jail, where many were allegedly subject to torture.
Over the coming decades, the Ayatollah would attempt to turn Iran into an aggressive power, wielding influence across the Middle East and framing the US and Israel as Iran’s principal enemies.
Under his rule, Tehran built and funded a network of proxies across the region including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Israel and Palestine and the Houthi movement in Yemen. The Ayatollah developed a close relationship with Syria’s former president Bashar al-Assad, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But it was the rebuilding of Iran’s nuclear programme that would ultimately put the country on a collision course with the west, despite the Ayatollah’s insistence that the regime did not intend to build nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad’s successor, centrist cleric Hassan Rouhani, took a less belligerent approach to foreign policy upon his election as President in 2015 and sought to defuse tensions with the west.
In 2015, he struck a deal with the US and western allies to limit the Iranian nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and other provisions.
But three years later, President Donald Trump would withdraw from the agreement, arguing it did not do enough to restrain Iran. Sanctions on Tehran caused significant economic harm.
In 2020, tensions between Iran and the US increased significantly after Washington killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike. Tehran launched retaliatory missile strikes on US bases in Iraq.
The Ayatollah faced a domestic crisis in 2022, when nationwide protests erupted following the death of Mahsa Amini while in morality police custody. Widespread demonstrations prompted a ruthless crackdown, with arrests and executions of protesters.
The past five years have also seen the dismantling of Iran’s proxy network. Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel brought a massive Israeli retaliation on the Gaza Strip, but also prompted the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to launch several operations targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
An even heavier blow to the Ayatollah came in December 2024 with the fall of Assad in Syria, when Sunni rebels marched on the capital and removed him from power. Suddenly, a government hostile to Iran and Hezbollah was in power in Damascus.
In June 2025, the US bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities. The strike came in support of Israel’s 12-day war on the Islamic republic in June, although the US reportedly proved unsuccessful in destroying Iran’s alleged nuclear weapon’s programme.
Trump claims Iranian Supreme Leader killed in US-Israeli strikes
Iran latest: Trump says Ayatollah Khamenei killed in US-Israeli strike
Trump confirms killing of ‘evil’ Iran leader Khamenei in US-Israeli air strikes
Ayatollah Khamenei is dead. Here’s who could lead Iran next
Multiple people injured in Dubai airport incident on day of Iranian strikes
Iran’s key political figures explained after Ali Khamenei killed in US strikes
