Israel and the United States consider Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dead. in the bombings launched this Saturday alongside the United States. First, an official Israeli source told the country’s media on condition of anonymity. Later, the American president, Donald Trump, confirmed it on his social network Truth: “Khameneí, one of the most evil people in history, is dead.”
Israeli sources have assured that the body of the Iranian leader has been found in a bunker and that the intelligence services have seen a graphic document from the place. Shortly after the Israeli announcement, the Iranian news agencies, Tasnim and Mehr, both linked to the Revolutionary Guard, assured that Khamenei remains “firm and determined in command of the battlefield.” Iran’s public relations chief had earlier accused the country’s enemies of waging “psychological warfare.”
86 years old, Khamenei is the highest authority in Iran since the death in 1989 of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini. If confirmed, it would be the first time that Israel has assassinated a top leader in power. Until now he had never killed a head of state. He has only done it with the leaders of militia parties, like Hezbollah or Hamas.
Late in the day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were “growing signs” that Khamenei was no longer alive. “This morning we destroyed the tyrant Khamenei’s complex,” Netanyahu declared in a brief video speech, after accusing him of “encouraging terrorism around the world, plunging his own people into misery and working constantly and tirelessly on a program to annihilate the State of Israel” for three decades.
“There are growing signs that this tyrant is no more. This morning we eliminated senior officials of the Ayatollah regime, commanders of the Revolutionary Guard and important figures in the nuclear program, and we will continue. In the coming days, we will attack thousands more targets of the terrorist regime,” Netanyahu declared.
He Trump’s social media message assures: “This is not only justice for the people of Iran, but for all the great Americans and for the people of many countries around the world who have been murdered or maimed by Khamenei and his band of bloodthirsty THUGS. He could not avoid our intelligence and our highly sophisticated tracking systems and, working closely with Israel, there was nothing he – nor the other leaders who have been murdered alongside him – could do.”
Israel’s initial strikes against Iran earlier in the day targeted about 30 Iranian regime leaders and military chiefs, according to local media. The Iranian leader’s daughter, a grandson and other family were also killed in the attack, Reuters reported citing Iranian state media.
The declared objective of the joint offensive between the United States and Israel is the overthrow of the Islamic regime, born of the 1979 revolution.
An unexpected leader
Ali Khamenei was the unexpected heir of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. Without the charisma or political talent of his predecessor, the Shiite cleric has nevertheless managed to remain more than 36 years as supreme leader of a country in crisis for decades due to the authoritarian nature of his regime, the lack of channels for political opposition, isolation and international sanctions, and the corruption of its elites. Also because of the confrontation with the United States and Israel, which, finally, believe they killed him this Saturday.
The Shiite cleric was born in 1939 in Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, into a modest family of black-turbaned religious men – the garment that indicates descent from the Prophet Muhammad – with Persian roots and in the Azeri minority. As a religious young man, he learned about the ideas of Seyed Qotb, the Egyptian ideologue of political Islam, part of whose work he translated from Arabic to Persian.
Although Qotb, executed in Egypt in 1966, was Sunni – the majority of Iranians are Shiites – some of the ideological pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Khamenei’s thought are the perfect reflection of his ideas. Above all, the refusal to separate Islam from the State and the defense of a group of theocrats at the top of the State interpreting Islamic law and imposing their decisions on society and the Government so that they do not deviate from what they consider the right path. Also the belief that Islam is a wall against imperialism – especially American – and Zionism.
This worldview conceives Islamic precepts as a way of life, a moral compass that should govern everything. Hence what, outside Iran, was often described as an obsession of the Iranian regime and its supreme leader with female dress, the ultimate manifestation of a deeply conservative view of the role of women in the family and society.
Especially with respect to the veil, the garment that caused a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Yina Mahsa Amini, to die at the hands of the morality police in September 2022, who arrested her after accusing her of wearing the hijab incorrectly. That death sparked widespread protests in Iran in 2022.
The authorities then responded with repression. However, the around 550 deaths at that time pale in comparison to the numbers of victims of the repression of the last wave of protests against the Islamic regime, which broke out at the end of December. By mid-January, at least 7,000 people had died in the streets across the country, according to the Iranian exile NGO HRANA. The official figure is 3,117. Both in the protests over the death of the young Amini and in the latest demonstrations, Khamenei was deaf to the clamor from his people. It is assumed that he either ordered the repression himself, or at least tolerated it.
Many of the more than 92 million Iranians were not born when Khamenei succeeded Khomeini in 1989. The average age of the country’s population is about 33 years (in Spain, 45). They have not met another head of state, other than the supreme leader that Israel and the United States now believe they have killed. In his long stay in power, Khamenei managed to accumulate prerogatives that in Khomeini’s hands had been very broad and in his own they became omnipresent.
His legacy will not be the prosperous Islamist Arcadia he dreamed of, but an impoverished country – almost 10 million Iranians sank into misery between 2011 and 2020, according to the World Bank – with moderate leaders imprisoned or politically annihilated and a population traumatized by repression.
The Israeli and American military aggression that began this Saturday further darkens that dark heritage for citizens who have turned their backs on the Islamic Republic. For Iranians who still support his political system – it is estimated that they are around a third of the population – his murder, if confirmed, would nevertheless make him a martyr.
His death without a known successor and in the midst of a military onslaught would deepen the abyss into which the Islamic Republic is facing. The overthrow of this political system is now the stated goal of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in attacking Iran.
