Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86

He played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran’s Islamic revolution, served as president in the 1980s and dominated the country for more than three decades.

February 28, 2026 at 5:07 p.m

By William Branigin

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Shiite Muslim cleric who played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran’s Islamic revolution, served two terms as president in the 1980s and dominated the country for more than three decades as supreme leader, was killed Saturday as Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran. He was 86.

President Donald Trump announced the death in a Truth Social post, calling the ayatollah “one of the most evil people in History.” Hours later, his death was confirmed by announcers on Iranian state television, who said Ayatollah Khamenei was killed at his office.

Black smoke billowed over the ayatollah’s compound in Tehran on Saturday, near the outset of a joint military operation aimed at decimating Iran’s nuclear program and military and fueling a change in government.

In announcing the attack, the second by Israeli and U.S. forces since June 2025, Trump publicly urged Iranians to “take over your government” once the operation ended. He had previously called on Iranians to rise up and pledged U.S. backing after widespread anti-government demonstrations broke out in December. Sparked by a severe economic crisis, the protests burgeoned into mass demonstrations against Iran’s entrenched theocratic system. Previously taboo chants of “Death to Khamenei!” were heard in street marches across the country.

Security forces responded by launching a bloody crackdown, killing more than 6,800 protesters and detaining tens of thousands. Ayatollah Khamenei blamed the carnage on Trump, denouncing him as a “criminal” who “openly encouraged” the protesters by promising U.S. military support.

An early follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the austere cleric who inspired the revolution against Iran’s U.S.-backed monarchy, Ayatollah Khamenei staunchly opposed the United States and Israel, rejected Western “liberalism,” and adhered strictly to fundamentalist social policies.

As supreme leader of Iran since 1989 — when he succeeded Khomeini — Ayatollah Khamenei wielded ultimate political and religious authority in the Islamic republic, outranking the elected president and overseeing the country’s armed forces, internal security apparatus, judiciary, state media and foreign policy.

He had the final say on a landmark July 2015 nuclear accord with six world powers, including the United States, that restricted Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of crippling economic sanctions. Although deeply distrustful of U.S. motives, and despite the misgivings of fellow hard-liners, he ultimately endorsed the deal, and it was formally implemented in January 2016.

But he appeared to regret it after Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement in 2018 during his first term and reimposed harsh sanctions. (In retaliation, Iran began disregarding some provisions of the nuclear deal, notably limits on quantity and quality of its production of enriched uranium, but did not renounce its pledge never to acquire nuclear weapons.) Ayatollah Khamenei was especially incensed by the Trump-ordered killing of a top Iranian commander, Qasem Soleimani, in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. He called the killing “a cowardly act,” denounced Trump as a “clown” and rejected the U.S. president’s calls for new talks, which he said were intended only to boost Trump’s reelection bid.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Ayatollah Khamenei said its chaotic aftermath, marked by Trump’s baseless fraud claims, illustrated “the ugly face of liberal democracy” in the United States and made clear the country’s “definite political, civil [and] moral decline.”

When Iran was convulsed by widespread protests after the September 2022 death in custody of a young woman who was arrested by Islamic “morality police” for a dress-code violation, the supreme leader publicly blamed the United States and Israel and backed a deadly crackdown. How, he wondered, could some people “not see the foreign hand” behind the “rioting.”

With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” But like the uncompromising Khomeini, he opposed moderates’ efforts to promote political and social reforms domestically and to secure rapprochement with the United States.

Some Iranians who knew Ayatollah Khamenei before he became supreme leader described him as a “closet moderate,” Karim Sadjadpour, a leading researcher on Iran with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a 2008 study. Others, however, took him at face value, Sadjadpour said: “a deeply religious, ideologically rigid, anti-American cleric whose politics are stuck in the anti-imperialist euphoria of the 1979 revolution.”

In the third decade of his rule, Iran became increasingly repressive, especially after security forces crushed demonstrations against the disputed 2009 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s image as “an impartial and magnanimous guide” unraveled, exposing him as “a petty, partisan autocrat” dependent far more on his intelligence, security and military apparatus than on the Muslim clergy, Sadjadpour wrote.

Ayatollah Khamenei first came to prominence as a strong supporter of the militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for more than 14 months. He was seriously injured in a 1981 assassination attempt but went on to win the first of two terms as Iran’s president less than four months later, becoming the first cleric to hold that post.

Ayatollah Khamenei embraced nuclear energy while insisting that Iran would not seek nuclear weapons, which he declared to be forbidden by Islam. But he adamantly refused to give up Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, which he regarded as a hallmark of scientific prowess, independence and national pride.

The July 2015 nuclear accord allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but at a sharply reduced level.

Arrests, torture under the shah

Ali Khamenei was born July 17, 1939, in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, where his father was a Shiite cleric of humble means. He was the second of eight children, and he and his family “had a difficult life,” sometimes with little to eat but bread and raisins, he said in a biography published on his website.

He was sent to Islamic schools from an early age, and in his late teens, he briefly studied in Najaf, a Shiite shrine city and center of learning in neighboring Iraq. He then went to the Shiite holy city of Qom, about 90 miles south of Tehran, where he studied for six years under Khomeini. But he had to cut short his training at Qom’s renowned Islamic seminary in 1964 to return to Mashhad to care for his ailing father, a decision he later said accounted for his failure to attain the highest credentials of Islamic scholarship.

He did, however, learn Arabic, becoming proficient enough to translate several Arabic books into Farsi over the years. They included works of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, an intensely anti-American theorist of Islamic holy war whose writings have also influenced leaders of al-Qaeda.

In the spring of 1963, Khomeini ignited protests against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-backed shah, that were violently put down by security forces. Ayatollah Khamenei was arrested by the shah’s secret police, known as SAVAK, and “spent 10 days under severe torture,” according to his official biography. In late 1964, his mentor Khomeini was expelled from Iran and spent more than 14 years in exile, most of it in Najaf.

Between 1963 and 1976, Ayatollah Khamenei was arrested seven times and spent a total of three years in prison before being sentenced to a sort of internal exile in Iranshahr in the far southeastern corner of the country.
Future ayatollah Khamenei, center, with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, right, in 1981 in Tehran. (AFP/Getty Images)

With the Islamic revolution underway, he returned to Mashhad and took part in street battles that preceded the shah’s departure into exile on Jan. 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s triumphant return to Tehran on Feb. 1. Khomeini named Ayatollah Khamenei to a newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Council, a shadowy group that was instrumental in running the country after the last vestiges of the shah’s regime collapsed on Feb. 11, 1979.

Then a mid-level Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Khamenei won a seat in the Iranian parliament in 1980 as a member of the Islamic Republican Party, which he helped found, and was appointed by Khomeini to the key post of Friday prayers leader in the capital.

He delivered weekly sermons before large crowds, usually with a rifle in his hands, and built a following as he used his oratorical skills to rail against the Islamic revolution’s perceived enemies, notably the United States, “the Great Satan.”

During this period, he also served briefly as a deputy defense minister and supervisor of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military force fiercely loyal to the supreme leader.

Ayatollah Khamenei narrowly escaped death in June 1981 when a bomb concealed in a tape recorder exploded next to him as he addressed a crowd at a Tehran mosque.


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