Who is Iran's ruthless supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

Times

19-06-2025

Tehran's bitter winter had penetrated the dungeon and left the frail inmate shivering with cold. Houshang Asadi, a communist dissident, took pity on his cellmate and gave him his sweater. The man refused it at first before tearfully accepting the gift. 'Houshang,' the man said, 'when Islam will come to power, not a single tear will be shed.'
That memory of Ali Khamenei in 1975 as an idealist who suffered for his opposition to the Shah stayed with Asadi for decades to come. Years later, in 2003, Khamenei, now the undisputed dictator of Iran who threw young men and women into those same dungeons, repaid Asadi's kindness by forcing him into exile.
'He changed from a man who fought for freedom into a dictator,' Asadi told an interviewer. 'Now Mr Khamenei is more of a dictator than a shah.' If he met him again, he said, he would ask: 'Who are you, Mr Khamenei?'
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Khamenei might answer that he is a survivor, born to an impoverished cleric, Javad Khamenei, in the religious Iraqi city of Najaf in 1939. He began his religious studies at four, studying under various jurists, until one day in 1958 he came across Ruhollah Khomeini — later supreme leader of Iran from 1979 to 1989 — in the Iranian seminary city of Qom.
That encounter set Khamenei down a path that almost led to his death this week, when Israel spotted an opportunity to kill the leader — although the US vetoed the plan. If Khamenei escaped assassination, it would not be the first time. He had become a confidant of Khomeini, who began sending him on missions across Iran to agitate against the Shah, leading to his arrest and eventual exile.
He returned to Iran triumphantly in 1979 with his mentor, and quickly rose up the ranks of the new Islamic regime. Two years later, a bomb hidden in a tape recorder blew up in his face as he gave a religious lecture, leaving him with a paralysed right arm.
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In a picture taken at his hospital bed, Khamenei peers out from behind his thick spectacles, his arm in a sling, with a faint smile hidden by his bushy moustache and beard. Three months later, he became the president of Iran.
Iran in the 1980s was torn by revolutionary fervour, purges and war. Opponents of the new Islamic regime were 'disappeared' and executed, as Khomeini sought to plant the seeds of Islamic revolution — and Iran's influence — in the region by backing militants from Lebanon to Kuwait. Iraq, backed by the US and Gulf countries, invaded Iran, setting off a ruinous war.
The Iraqis were beaten back fairly quickly but Khomeini and Khamenei decided to counter-invade Iraq, a decision Khamenei later rued as Iran became bogged down in a war attrition that only ended in 1988. Before Khomeini died a year later, he had chosen Khamenei to succeed him.
It was a controversial choice. Khomeini had been widely expected to be replaced by the relatively moderate Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, with whom he had fallen out shortly before his death.
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Unlike Montazeri, Khamenei was not a Shia religious authority, a prerequisite to become the supreme leader. But Khomeini's confidence in him — and his own uncanny ability to build a network of alliances throughout the state — thrust him onto the voting council.
As with Asadi's sweater on that winter's day in 1975, Khamenei made a show of declining the gift. 'My nomination should make us all cry tears of blood,' he said.
He spent the following three decades ruthlessly entrenching himself, often at the expense of the state, by planting loyalists in the Islamic Republic's power centres and playing them off each other, weakening all but him. A self-professed admirer of western literature with the affectations of a philosopher, Khamenei had doubled down on Khomeini's hatred of the US and Israel.
On his watch, Iran turned into an undisputed regional power, building allies and proxies in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza, while building the region's largest missile arsenal and furthering its nuclear programme. He occasionally allowed reformist presidents to be elected, only to undermine them publicly and privately.
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His police and soldiers periodically put down protests, and his regime is more unpopular than ever. In recent years, Khamanei has busied himself with preparations for his succession. After President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash last year, he appears to have settled on one of his six children, Mojtaba.
Those plans are in disarray. Iran's allies in the region have been devastated by war with Israel over the past two years, and Khamenei, who had predicted the Jewish state's demise by 2030, may not survive this one.