Who is Iran's Supreme Leader? He has something in common with Trump.

The Herald Scotland

19-06-2025

As Israel and Iran traded attacks for a sixth day, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned on June 18 that the United States would face "irreparable damage" if its military joined Israel's conflict with Iran. Khamenei's comments, made in an address on state TV, came after President Donald Trump took to social media to insist that Iran yield to Israel, which wants to destroy Tehran's nuclear program and thus prevent its weaponization.
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Trump has also raised the possibility of directly targeting Khamenei, writing on social media that "we know exactly where" he is, but adding "we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least for now."
Here's a closer look at Khamenei, Iran's top decision-maker for nearly four decades.
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Who Is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader?
Khamenei, 86, was born into a clerical family in 1939. As a young man, he participated in religious training in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad, in eastern Iran, as well as Najaf, which is in Iraq.
He found his calling as a religious leader while in political opposition to Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a U.S.-backed autocrat and monarchist who used secret police and torture on his opponents.
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Pahlavi is known as the "last shah of Iran." He died in exile and his son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, lives outside Washington, D.C., where he still occasionally talks about one day returning to Iran.
According to his official biography, published in 1963, Khamenei himself was tortured age 24 when he served the first of many prison terms for political activities under the shah's rule.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - rising through the ranks
Khamenei was a close ally of Iran's first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the figure who led the country's 1979 revolution that overthrew Pahlavi and founded Iran's Islamic Republic.
After the revolution, Khamenei quickly rose through Iran's religious and political ranks, becoming a deputy defense minister. In that role he became close to the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The IRGC is a powerful security organization with a vast political and economic power base that extends to Iran's armed forces, as well as its strategic industries from oil to agriculture.
With Khomeini's support, Khamenei won Iran's presidency in 1981. As the nation's top elected official, he is responsible for the running of the government and has influence over domestic policy and foreign affairs, but Iran's president is ultimately second in rank to the supreme leader.
A property empire built on seizures
Khamenei became Iran's supreme leader in 1989. He was 50.
He now has the final say on all of Iran's domestic and foreign policy. He appoints the heads of its justice department, security and intelligence agencies and state media. He decides who can run for president. He has authority over Iran's nuclear program. He interprets the application of Iran's religious laws and codes.
For decades, Khamenei has also been at the heart of Iran's strategy, weakened in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that resulted in the war in Gaza, of projecting its power and influence across the Middle East region through a network of militant groups stretching from Gaza to Yemen.
Khamenei decides whether Iran goes to war and whether to improve, or not, relations with Washington.
More than a decade ago, a Reuters investigation concluded that Iran's ayatollah also controlled a massive financial empire built on property seizures in the chaotic years after the 1979 revolution, when many Iranians fled overseas.
This is, of course, a very different property world to Trump's, whose father Fred amassed an unglamorous fortune building apartments, then watched his son turn the family business into a glitzy real-estate empire.
In fact, the supreme leader's acolytes have for years praised his spartan lifestyle. They point to his modest wardrobe and threadbare carpet in his Tehran home. But Setad, the organization he presided over, had holdings of real estate, corporate stakes and other assets totaling about $95 billion in 2013, according to Reuters. The news wire reportedthat the business juggernaut held stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.