MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead. That's according to President Trump in a statement he posted to Truth Social. This follows airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel early today. Khamenei was 86 years old. During his rule, he was unwavering in his steadfast antipathy to the U.S. and Israel and to any effort to change Iran's government. NPR's international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam has this obituary.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: During the 1970s, Iran was in turmoil. There were widespread and bloody protests against the U.S.-backed shah. Back then, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, then a mid-level cleric, was arrested several times for speaking out against the shah. Khamenei was close with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was living in exile in France. When Khomeini swept back into Iran and seized power in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Khamenei joined him. And for the next decade, he was part of the supreme leader's inner circle. In 1989, when the ayatollah died, Khamenei was chosen as his successor.
ALEX VATANKA: He was the unlikely candidate. He knew himself he didn't have the prestige, the gravitas, to be, you know, the successor to the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.
NORTHAM: Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, says a lack of religious credentials also left Khamenei feeling vulnerable.
VATANKA: So he spent the first few years in power being very nervous. He really literally felt that somebody's going to, you know, take him down from the position of power.
NORTHAM: But Khamenei was cunning, says Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. He was able to outwit other senior political figures in the Islamic Republic. With the help of the formidable Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Khamenei built up his power base to become the longest-serving leader in the Middle East.
ALI VAEZ: Ayatollah Khamenei was a man with strategic patience and was able to calculate a few steps ahead. And that's why I think he managed, on the back of the Revolutionary Guards, to increasingly appropriate all levers of power in his hands and sideline everyone else.
NORTHAM: But Khamenei's close ties to the Revolutionary Guards allowed Iran's military to develop a vast commercial empire in control of many parts of the economy, while ordinary Iranians struggled to get by. Khamenei also began to build up Iran's defensive policies, says Vaez, such as developing proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to deter a direct attack on Iranian soil.
VAEZ: And then also becoming self-reliant in developing a viable, conventional deterrence, which took the form of Iran's ballistic missile program.
NORTHAM: As supreme leader, Khamenei also had the final word on anything to do with Iran's nuclear program. Over time, Khamenei increasingly injected himself into politics. Such was the case in 2009, when he intervened in presidential elections to ensure the controversial conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got in. Iranians took to the streets to protest what were widely seen as fraudulent elections.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in non-English language).
NORTHAM: Khamenei brutally crushed the demonstrations, triggering a backlash and more protest movements over the years, says Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
SANAM VAKIL: Khamenei had always supported and endorsed repressive government crackdown, recognizing that these protests were damaging to the stability and legitimacy of the state.
NORTHAM: But Khamenei was unconcerned about getting to the root of the protests, says the Middle East Institute's Vatanka, and he remained stuck in an Islamic revolutionary mindset against the West.
VATANKA: He, on so many occasions, refused point blank to accept the basic reality that where he was, in terms of his worldview, was not where the rest of his people were.
NORTHAM: Vatanka says 75% of Iran's 90 million people were born after the revolution and have watched other countries in the region modernize and integrate with the international community.
VATANKA: The 75% he should have catered to, listened to and addressed policies to satisfy their aspirations - he failed in that miserably.
NORTHAM: But the crisis groups, Vaez says, after the Arab Spring uprising in 2011 - Khamenei did start worrying about the survival of the regime. The economy was crumbling due in large part to stringent Western sanctions. He agreed to secret negotiations with the U.S. over Iran's nuclear program that eventually led to the 2015 nuclear agreement. But Vaez says Khamenei was deeply skeptical about the deal.
VAEZ: His argument has always been the U.S. is always looking for pretexts for putting pressure on Iran. And if Iran concedes on the nuclear issue, then the U.S. would put pressure on Iran because of its missiles program or because of human rights violations or because of its regional policies.
NORTHAM: Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal during his first term in office gave some credence to Khamenei's cynicism. Analysts say Iran increased its nuclear enrichment after that to a point where it was close to being able to build a bomb. In early 2025, when Trump reached out about a new deal, Khamenei dragged out negotiations. But time ran out. After Israel launched several attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, Trump unleashed bunker busters on three key enrichment sites.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
NORTHAM: Facilities were seriously damaged but not obliterated. Chatham House's Sanam Vakil says Khamenei underestimated what Israel and the U.S. would do.
VAKIL: I think that Khamenei always assumed that he could play for time. And what he really didn't understand is that the world around Iran had very much changed and had tired of Khamenei and Iranian foot dragging and antics. And so that was a miscalculation.
NORTHAM: And now his legacy is in tatters. By the time Khamenei died, Israel had decimated two key proxies - Hamas and Hezbollah - wiped out Iran's air defenses and, with U.S. help, left Iran's nuclear program in shambles. What remains is a robust ballistic missile program, the brainchild of Khamenei. It's unclear who will replace him to lead a weakened, vulnerable Iran. Jackie Northam, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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