A life of sanctimony and violence

THE YEARS DID NOT MELLOW ALI Khamenei.

- BY KARL VICK

Iranians pass a poster of Khamenei after an event at Tehran's largest cemetery on Feb. 1

Appointed Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran at age 50, he was the longest-serving ruler in the Middle East at the time of his death at 86 on Feb. 28, 2026. The Islamic Republic had been founded by his mentor, Ruhollah Khomeini, the Grand Ayatollah who, after the 1979 revolution, replaced a monarchy with a theocracy. But it was Khamenei who ruled for three-quarters of the republic’s existence, transforming it into a de facto military dictatorship.

Sometimes clothes do make the man. Khamenei wore the turban of a senior Shi‘ite cleric. But the pale plaid kerchief often looped around his neck was favored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the praetorian force he elevated to near co-ruler status. By the early 2000s, the Guards had consolidated military, political, and economic power so extensively that a prominent Iranian economist remarked, with raised eyebrows, that the only comparison was to National Socialism in 1930s Germany.

If that arrangement solidified Khamenei’s rule, it left little for Iran’s 93 million people—and even less after the regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon triggered intensifying international sanctions that sent the economy into free fall at the end of 2025. With hard-currency reserves depleted and inflation soaring, Iranians took to the streets en masse, chanting for the regime’s downfall. On Khamenei’s orders, security forces killed an estimated 30,000 people, according to senior health officials.

Over the following two months, President Trump opened negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program while deploying two aircraft-carrier groups and additional warplanes to the region, the largest U.S. military buildup there since the 2003 invasion of Iraq—an armada that was finally unleashed on Iran in the early hours of Feb. 28.