2 March 2026

The fall of Ayatollah Khamenei

He became the gravedigger of the revolution that he helped lead

In many respects, the story of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is the story of the Islamic republic itself. No one has been as closely bound up with its messianic project including even his mentor, the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Born in the north-eastern city of Mashhad in 1939, Khamenei completed his early religious education there before moving to Najaf and then Qom. All are invested with huge religious significance for Shia Muslims. Mashhad is home to the final resting place of Ali al-Rida, the eighth imam of the 12 revered by Shias as being divinely inspired human exemplars. Notably, he is the only one buried in Iran, underscoring the significance of Mashhad in Shia thought.

Khamenei later went to study in Najaf in Iraq, arguably the holiest city in Shia Islam because it houses the tomb of the first Imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad. It was a short-lived experience, lasting barely a year, because his father urged him to return to Iran. When he did, in 1958, he settled in Qom, widely regarded as the next most holy city after Najaf, and the powerbase of Iran’s scholarly and clerical class. It was here that Khamenei first met Khomeini and began attending his classes, aged just 19. These were formative. Indeed, Khamenei has repeatedly spoken about the indelible impact Khomeini left on his thinking, crediting him with being the foundational source of his worldview.

Shias believe the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, never died and is in occultation, waiting for God to restore him near the end of times when he will establish justice. Contemporary Shia Islam had therefore regressed into staid form, simply waiting for the return of their promised messiah. Khomeini changed all this. Rather than wait passively for the imam to appear, he argued that the clergy had a duty to become active political agents, preparing conditions on the ground for his arrival. This famously involved establishing a political trust (known as wilayat al-faqih) by which jurists would create an Islamic state and maintain it as guardians until the Mahdi’s promised return. This was a dramatically more strategic posture than the quietist approach Iran’s clergy had previously been used to.

Although this doctrine was codified in 1970, the ideas behind it had been germinating for long before. For example, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, announced his so-called White Revolution in January 1963, an expensive programme of both social and economic reforms, Khomeini was stirred into action. He developed two crucial tents, signals of the ultimate trajectory of his revolutionary thinking. The first was that he regarded the Shah’s reforms as undermining Islam by expanding the franchise to include women and by empowering non-Muslims to hold public offices and related positions, including within the judiciary. The second was that he regarded the ultimate source of these reforms as stemming from the United States and Israel, infusing his worldview with a deep-rooted anti-imperialism.

Revealing his savvy as a political actor, Khomeini delivered an impassioned speech against the Shah on 3 June, which also happened to be Ashura, a significant day of mourning for Shia Muslims who commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Drawing parallels between the Shah and Hussein’s assassins, Khomeini was arrested for his dissent, sparking outrage among his supporters during what came to be known as the 15 Khordad protests.

This was Khamenei’s moment, marking his transition from student to activist. He carried clandestine messages for his mentor, delivered speeches of his own and mobilised movements around the country in support of Khomeini’s vision. When the latter was forced into exile the following year, Khamenei became one of his primary confidants, developing underground networks and maintaining constant pressure on the Shah, and demonstrating two important traits along the way. The first was his utter devotion to the cause, and the second was his shared hardship with his mentor. After repeated arrests and persecution, he was eventually subjected to internal banishment in 1977. The Shah’s secret police decided he should be sent to Iranshahr, a remote desert city in south-eastern Iran which is predominantly Sunni. Here, they reasoned, Khamenei would struggle to find meaningful support and would drift into irrelevance.

His steadfast loyalty was rewarded once Khomeini came to power following the Islamic revolution in 1979, with Khamenei holding a series of prominent positions. He was appointed to the Revolutionary Council and also became President in 1981. But it was another position conferred upon him the previous year which really signified his growing prominence – and intractability – within the Islamic Republic. In January 1980, Khamenei was appointed Imam of Friday Prayer in Tehran, a position invested with greater purpose than a merely straightforward clerical appointment. In revolutionary Iran, it represents the primary instrument of state power through which the regime delivers official addresses to its people. Khamenei cherished the role so much that he never gave it up.

These offices allowed him to develop both religious and political visibility, paving the way for him to succeed Khomeini after his death in 1989. Rising to become supreme leader aged just 50, Khamenei lacked his predecessor’s charisma and force of personality, so instead pursued a more technocratic process of institutionalising the revolution into a hulking bureaucracy. In doing so, he centralised power around himself in two significant ways – expanding the scope and authority of both his personal office and that of the Revolutionary Guard units in the Iranian military (known as the IRGC).

This approach stems from his time as president, during which he also served as Khomeini’s de facto defence envoy during the Iran-Iraq war, often visiting the frontlines and developing a close relationship with leading military officials. Following the conflict with Saddam Hussein, he embarked on a disastrous programme of cultivating the so-called “axis of resistance” abroad and empowering the IRGC at home. He developed a dual strategy: the IRGC would protect the home front and maintain order, while Shia proxies abroad would contain the threat from Saddam. Throughout the 1990s, it seemed to work, prompting Khamenei to revisit the idea of cultivating an even deeper policy of “forward defence” when faced by challenges such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring of 2011, the Syrian Civil War and the rise of Isis.

Iran’s sphere of influence grew unchecked across the Levant with deep entrenchments across Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. Not only did it provide a layer of defence, but it also fulfilled Khamenei’s anti-imperial worldview. He believed that Iran was now successfully curtailing a malignant Israeli-American alliance which had asserted itself across the Gulf, but which he had managed to undercut in the Levant.

But all this lulled Khamenei into a false sense of security. He believed Iran’s labyrinthine web of proxies would make it impossible to attack him, a revolutionary regime buffered by a regional rolodex. It was a chimera. The fallout from 7 October revealed just how threadbare the network was, as Israel pummelled Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and various associated militias operating across Iraq. When Bashar al-Assad was suddenly ousted in December 2024, Iran also lost its airbridge to Lebanon, further isolating Hezbollah, once regarded as the jewel in the IRGC’s crown. To understand just how neutered that network is today, consider that none of these proxies has vowed any retaliatory response to Khamenei’s assassination, beyond issuing hagiographical eulogies.

This collapse reveals just how decayed and deracinated Khamenei’s legacy now is. His traditional support for the Palestinian issue once allowed him to straddle the Sunni-Shia divide, casting Iran as a global bulwark of not just Shia interests, but Islam as a whole. After all, he argued, only Iran was providing any meaningful support for Hamas. This was a view some radical Sunnis were once inclined to support. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, for example, the late spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, urged Sunnis to set aside sectarian differences and support Hezbollah during their 2006 war against Israel. Later, when Khamenei oversaw the deployment of both Shia militias and IRGC forces to Syria where they engaged in appalling sectarian violence, Qaradawi recanted his position and confessed to having been duped by the Iranian leadership. The change in attitude is evident: the minarets of mosques across Syria sang celebratory calls once news of Khamenei’s assassination was confirmed.

The delirious effects of his mismanagement and militarisation have been felt most acutely at home. Prioritising resistance over renaissance has produced delirious economic outcomes. The IRGC, tasked with maintaining order both at home and internationally, has grown into a sprawling administration of economic and personal interests, driven by power and patronage. By some estimates, it controls between 20 and 40 per cent of the economy, while the State Department estimates Tehran has spent up to $16bn funding its proxies in the region since 2012. Driven paranoid by what he saw as burgeoning security threats everywhere, Khamenei allowed the IRGC to develop a parallel political and intelligence apparatus at the cost of his own people. It has spawned widespread corruption, squeezing the middle classes, while the Iranian rial has lost over 90 per cent of its value since 2018. It is the sprawling nature of this institution that observers are now watching to assess Iran’s future trajectory. Its leaders are too invested – financially and politically – to simply change course. They might be less ideologically committed than Khamenei was to the cause, but they are no less motivated in realising his ultimate goal: regime survival.

All this delivered Khamenei to his ultimate end. Presiding over a movement which, for decades, has chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, it was ultimately that axis which visited death upon him. Social media reports reveal a deeply divided Iran in the aftermath – perfectly capturing the state he built. His messianic supporters are mourning the loss of their leader and vow revenge, blinded to the realities of his ruinous revolution. Ordinary Iranians lament a stunted economy, the squandered wealth on foreign adventures, and half a century sacrificed to ideology. Amid the rubble and ruin, they ask: who will rise to rebuild?

[Further reading: Will Iran’s Islamic Republic survive the US onslaught?]