Politics
Who was Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, martyred in US-Israel attack?
WASHINGTON: The 36-year rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei built Iran into a powerful anti-US force and spread its military sway across the Middle East.
He was martyred on Saturday, aged 86, Iranian state media announced, in air strikes by Israel and the US that pulverised his central Tehran compound, after decades of efforts to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme diplomatically failed.
At first dismissed as weak and indecisive, Khamenei seemed an unlikely choice for supreme leader after the death of the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran. But Khamenei’s rise to the pinnacle of the country’s power structure afforded him a tight grip over the nation’s affairs.
Khamenei went from “a weak president to an initially weak supreme leader to one of the five most powerful Iranians of the last 100 years”, Karim Sadjadpour at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Reuters.
The ayatollah criticised Washington throughout his rule, continuing to deploy barbs after the start of Donald Trump’s second term as US president in 2025.
As a new wave of protests spread through Iran and as Trump threatened to intervene, Khamenei vowed in January that the country would not “yield to the enemy”.
The comment was typical of the ferociously anti-Western Khamenei, in office since 1989.
Final authority in Iran’s complex system
Khamenei long denied that Iran’s nuclear programme was aimed at producing an atomic weapon, as the West contended. In 2015, he cautiously supported a nuclear deal between world powers and the government of pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani that curbed the country’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. The hard-won accord resulted in a partial lifting of Iran’s economic and political isolation.
But Khamenei’s hostility toward the US was undimmed, intensifying in 2018 when Trump’s first administration withdrew from the nuclear agreement and reimposed sanctions to choke Iran’s oil and shipping industries.
Following the US withdrawal, Khamenei sided with hardline supporters who criticised Rouhani’s policy of appeasement towards the West.
As Trump pressed Iran to agree to a new nuclear deal in 2025, Khamenei condemned “the rude and arrogant leaders of America”. “Who are you to decide whether Iran should have enrichment?” he asked.
Khamenei often denounced “the Great Satan” in speeches, reassuring hardliners for whom anti-US sentiment was at the heart of the 1979 revolution, which forced the last shah of Iran into exile.
Iran saw major student-led protests in 1999 and 2002. But Khamenei’s authority was put to the test more profoundly in 2009, when the contested results of a presidential election that he had validated ignited violent street unrest, stoking a crisis of legitimacy that lingered until his death.
In 2022, Khamenei cracked down on protesters enraged by the death of Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, 22, who died in the custody of morality police in September of that year.
As supreme leader, he inherited enormous powers, including command of the armed forces and the authority to appoint many senior figures, among them the heads of the judiciary, security agencies and state radio and television.
He appointed allies as commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
As the final authority in Iran’s complex system of clerical rule and democracy, Khamenei long sought to ensure that no group, even among his closest allies, mustered enough power to challenge him and his anti-US stance.
An unlikely rise to power
Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, northeast Iran, in April 1939. His religious commitment was clear when he became a cleric at the age of 11. He studied in Iraq and in Qom, Iran’s religious capital.
His father, a religious scholar of ethnic Azeri descent, was a traditionalist cleric opposed to mixing religion and politics. In contrast, his son embraced the Islamist revolutionary cause.
“He (Khamenei’s father) came across as a modernist or progressive cleric,” said Mahmoud Moradkhani, a nephew. Unlike his son, “he was not a part of the fundamentalists”, Moradkhani said.
In 1963, Khamenei served the first of many terms in prison when at 24 he was detained for political activities. Later that year he was imprisoned for 10 days in Mashhad, where he underwent severe torture, according to his official biography.
After the Shah’s fall, Khamenei took up several posts in the Islamic Republic. As deputy minister of defence, he became close to the military and was a key figure in the 1980-88 war with neighbouring Iraq, which claimed an estimated total of one million lives.
A skilled orator, he was appointed by Khomeini as a Friday prayer leader in Tehran.
There were questions about his rapid, unprecedented rise. He won the presidency with Khomeini’s support — the first cleric in the post — and was a surprise choice as Khomeini’s successor, given that he lacked both Khomeini’s popular appeal and superior clerical credentials.
Expanding Iran’s influence
He presided over a vast financial empire through Setad, an organisation founded by Khomeini but expanded hugely under Khamenei, with assets worth tens of billions of dollars.
Khamenei expanded Iranian influence in the region. He spent billions over four decades on his allies.
But in 2024, Khamenei saw these alliances unravel, and Iran’s regional influence shrivel, with the ousting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a series of defeats inflicted by Israel on Hezbollah in Lebanon and on Hamas in Gaza, including the killing of their leaders.
Under Khamenei’s rule, Iran and Israel fought a shadow war for years, with Israel assassinating Tehran’s nuclear scientists and Revolutionary Guard commanders.
It exploded into the open during Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza from 2023. In April 2024, Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel after it bombed Tehran’s embassy compound in Damascus. Israel struck Iranian soil in response.
But that was only a prelude to June 2025, when Israel’s military unleashed hundreds of fighter jets to strike Iranian nuclear and military targets as well as senior personnel. The surprise attack provoked a barrage of missiles in both directions, transforming simmering conflict into all-out war. The US joined the air offensive on Iran, which lasted 12 days.
The US and Israel had warned they would strike again if Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and, on Saturday, they launched the most ambitious attack on Iranian targets in decades.
Negotiations between US and Iranian officials took place as recently as Thursday, but senior US officials said that Iran had not been willing to give up its ability to enrich uranium, which the Iranians argued they wanted for nuclear energy but US officials said would enable the country to build a nuclear bomb.
On the diplomatic front, Khamenei rejected any normalisation of ties with the United States. He argued that Washington had backed hardline groups like Daesh to inflame a sectarian war in the region.
Like all Iranian officials, Khamenei denied any intent to develop nuclear weapons and went so far as to issue an Islamic ruling, or fatwa, in the mid-1990s on “production and usage” of nuclear weapons, saying: “It is against our Islamic thoughts.”
The late ayatollah leaves an Islamic Republic wrestling with uncertainty amid the attacks from Israel and the United States, as well as growing dissent at home, especially among younger generations.
US President Donald Trump has said he could travel to Islamabad if a deal with Iran is signed there, signalling potential high-level involvement in ongoing negotiations mediated by Pakistan.
He added that if no agreement is reached with Iran, fighting will continue, and suggested the next round of talks could take place over the weekend.
On the ceasefire, Trump said progress was being made, adding that Iran is now willing to consider steps it had previously rejected. He also said he was not certain the ceasefire would need to be extended.
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US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Lebanon and Israel had agreed on a 10-day ceasefire, as optimism grew that the Iran war may be nearing an end.
Trump said in a social media post that the ceasefire would start at 5pm eastern time (2100 GMT), aiming to halt a conflict between Israel and the Iran-aligned Lebanese group Hezbollah that was reignited by the US-Israeli war against Iran.
He said he had held “excellent conversations” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun.
“These two Leaders have agreed that in order to achieve peace between their countries, they will formally begin a 10-day ceasefire at 5pm EST,” he said. “Both sides want to see peace, and I believe that will happen, quickly!”
Trump said he had directed US Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine to work with the two countries to achieve lasting peace.
The war with Iran spilt into Lebanon on March 2, when Hezbollah opened fire in support of Tehran, prompting an Israeli offensive in Lebanon 15 months after the last major conflict.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the ceasefire announcement, saying on X: “This is a relief, as this conflict has already claimed far too many lives.”
Breakthrough on ‘sticky issue’ between US and Iran
Thousands of people have been killed, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, since US-Israeli attacks on Iran began on February 28, triggering Iranian airstrikes on Iran’s Gulf neighbours and reigniting the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
Soaring energy costs have rattled investors and policymakers globally since Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply flows.
Closure of the strait has caused the worst oil price shock in history and forced the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to downgrade its outlook for the global economy, warning prolonged conflict could push the world to the brink of recession.
But hopes of a deal between Iran and the United States have been growing, with a two-week ceasefire in force.
A security source said a Pakistani mediator had made a breakthrough on “sticky issues”, although Tehran said the fate of its nuclear programme had not been resolved. Trump has said the accord would open the Strait of Hormuz.
Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) and Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Field Marshal Asim Munir, an important figure in mediation efforts, arrived in Tehran on Wednesday to try to prevent a renewal of the conflict after talks in Islamabad that ended without a deal.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Thursday the trip had led to greater hopes for a second round of talks and an extension of a two-week ceasefire, but said fundamental differences remain over its nuclear programme.
‘Locked and Loaded’
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said troops were poised to restart combat operations if a deal was not reached with Iran.
“We are reloading with more power than ever before, and better intelligence,” Hegseth told a Pentagon briefing. “We are locked and loaded on your critical dual-use infrastructure, on your remaining power generation, and on your energy industry. We’d rather not have to do it.”
But a security source told Reuters a deal was closing in and that the US wants a breakthrough before the ceasefire expires next week. Washington is offering to lift sanctions and unfreeze billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets, he said.
Iran will open the strait only if a permanent ceasefire is reached and there are United Nations guarantees that the US and Israel will not attack again in future, he said.
A separate government source said the talks would be held “soon” in Islamabad, although no date has been set.
Stock markets have rallied strongly in recent days on expectations of a swift resolution to the fighting, with global equities vaulting past their previous all-time highs in trading on Thursday. However, oil prices gained, showing continued uncertainty about the ceasefire prospects and the opening of the strait.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions were a sticking point at last weekend’s talks. The US proposed a 20-year suspension of all nuclear activity by Iran — an apparent concession from longstanding demands for a permanent ban. Tehran suggested a halt of three to five years, according to people familiar with the proposals.
Washington has pressed for any highly enriched uranium (HEU) to be removed from Iran. Tehran has demanded that international sanctions against it be lifted.
Two Iranian sources said there were signs of a compromise emerging on the HEU stockpile, with Tehran considering shipping part, but not all, of it out of the country, something it had previously ruled out.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif received a ceremonial fighter jet escort from the Qatari air force as his aircraft entered Qatari airspace en route to Doha, marking a significant gesture of diplomatic goodwill and strong bilateral ties.
The escort was arranged as part of a warm welcome during the second leg of the prime minister’s tri-nation visit from April 15 to 18, which comes at a time of heightened Middle East tensions and ongoing diplomatic efforts to help de-escalate the US-Iran conflict.
Upon arrival, the prime minister thanked the Qatari leadership and the pilots for the honour.
During the flight, PM Shehbaz expressed gratitude, saying he was “honoured” by the escort and thanked Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani for the gesture.
He said the honour extended not only to him but also to the people and government of Pakistan.
Upon arrival at Doha International Airport, the prime minister and his delegation were warmly received by Qatari Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Sultan bin Saad Al-Muraikhi. A smartly turned-out contingent of the Qatari Armed Forces presented a guard of honour, underscoring the significance of the visit.
In a gesture marking the occasion, Pakistani flags were displayed prominently at the airport and across parts of the Qatari capital, reflecting the close and friendly ties between the two countries.
Senior members of the Pakistani delegation accompanying the prime minister include Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Attaullah Tarar, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Tariq Fatemi, and the prime minister’s spokesperson for international media, Mosharraf Zaidi.
The prime minister will also travel to Turkiye following his visit to Qatar, the Foreign Office said, adding that PM Shehbaz will participate in the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, where he is scheduled to join the Leaders’ Panel alongside other global figures and present Pakistan’s perspective.
It added that the visits to Saudi Arabia and Qatar take place in a bilateral context, where the prime minister will discuss ongoing cooperation as well as regional peace and security.
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