Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who assembled theocratic power in Iran over the decades as its top 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 protests, has been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes. 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.
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. Israel 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 Saturday, 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.
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