Ali Khamenei

Biography

Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad on 19 April 1939, the son of a cleric, and studied in the seminaries of Mashhad and, from 1958, Qom, where he attended the classes of Ruhollah Khomeini. Like many politically active clerics, he opposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: the SAVAK security service arrested him six times between 1963 and 1976, and he was then banished for three years until the monarchy fell.

A close confidant of Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution, he took a series of posts in the new Islamic Republic, including deputy defence minister in 1979 and Friday prayer leader of Tehran from 1980. In June 1981 a bomb hidden in a tape recorder exploded beside him at a Tehran mosque, leaving his right arm permanently disabled. After President Mohammad-Ali Rajai was assassinated, Khamenei won the October 1981 presidential election, the first cleric to hold the office, and was re-elected in 1985. His presidency spanned the Iran-Iraq War and built his close ties to the Revolutionary Guards.

When Khomeini died in 1989, the Assembly of Experts chose Khamenei as supreme leader on 4 June, although he was not then a senior jurist, and confirmed him in August after the constitution was amended. Over 36 years he concentrated authority in the office, placed loyalists throughout the state and expanded the role of the Revolutionary Guards. He backed a civilian nuclear programme while issuing a religious ruling against nuclear weapons, endorsed the 2015 nuclear agreement, and his government suppressed several waves of mass protest.

He was killed on 28 February 2026 when Israeli aircraft struck his compound in Tehran on the first day of the 2026 Iran war; Iranian state media confirmed his death the following day.