Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei (19 April 1939 – 28 February 2026) was an Iranian politician and Shia cleric who served as the second Supreme Leader of Iran from 1989 until his assassination in 2026. A member of the Khamenei family who held the title Grand Ayatollah, he previously served as the third President of Iran from 1981 to 1989. His 36-year tenure as Supreme Leader made him the longest-serving head of state in West Asia at the time of his death.

Early Life and Education

Born in Mashhad to Javad Khamenei, an alim and mujtahid, and Khadijeh Mirdamadi, he was the sixth of eight children. He began his religious education in Mashhad's hawza, then settled in Qom in 1958, where he studied under Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi and Ruhollah Khomeini. His family lived in real poverty during his childhood, a period he later described in detail in his own recollections.

Revolutionary Activity and Imprisonment

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Khamenei became one of Khomeini's most active lieutenants inside Iran, organizing resistance and distributing Khomeini's writings against the Shah. The Shah's secret police, SAVAK, arrested him six times between 1963 and 1976, and he was exiled to Iranshahr for three years until the Shah's fall.

Post-Revolutionary Career and Presidency

After the 1979 revolution, Khamenei rose quickly through the new Islamic Republic, becoming Tehran's Friday Prayer Imam and a close confidant of Khomeini. In 1981, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt when a bomb concealed in a tape recorder exploded beside him at a mosque, permanently paralyzing his right arm — he subsequently shook hands only with his left. Later that year, following the assassination of President Mohammad-Ali Rajai, Khamenei was elected President of Iran, a post he held for two terms until 1989, presiding over Iran through the Iran-Iraq War.

Supreme Leadership (1989-2026)

Following Khomeini's death in June 1989, the Assembly of Experts elected Khamenei as Supreme Leader, despite his relatively junior clerical rank at the time — the constitution was subsequently amended to remove the requirement that the Supreme Leader hold the rank of marja'. As Supreme Leader, Khamenei held direct or indirect control over Iran's executive, legislative, and judicial branches, its armed forces, and state media, and could issue binding decrees on virtually any matter of state. He outlasted eight presidents and built the "Axis of Resistance," a network of allied movements and governments across the region including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi movement, and the Assad government in Syria. Domestically, his rule saw the suppression of major protest movements in 1999, 2009, 2017-2019, the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests, and the 2025-2026 protests, the last of which was met with a mass-casualty crackdown.

Assassination and Death

On 28 February 2026, the Israeli Air Force struck Khamenei's underground bunker in Tehran as part of a wider series of US and Israeli strikes on Iran that opened the 2026 Iran war. Iranian state television confirmed his death on 1 March 2026. The Assembly of Experts elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as his successor on 8 March 2026. Following a state funeral that began on 3 July 2026, Khamenei was buried at the Imam Reza Shrine in his native Mashhad.