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Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died on Sunday at 86, Iranian state media confirmed, shortly after the U.S. president publicly said Khamenei had been killed in an attack involving U.S. and Israeli forces. The announcement landed amid a volatile mix of nationwide protests, escalating U.S.-Iran confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program, and a regional military environment shaped by the past year’s wars and strikes.
Trump’s remarks came hours before Iranian officials confirmed the death without providing immediate details. The Associated Press report said Trump urged Iranians to topple the theocracy, and as rumors spread, some people in Tehran cheered from rooftops. The confirmation also raised questions about what would happen next, with the report describing Khamenei as dead and without a designated successor already set out in public.
Khamenei rose to supreme leadership in 1989 after overcoming doubts about his authority, including the fact that he was described as lacking the religious credentials of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Over time, the report said Khamenei entrenched the system of clerical rule in the Islamic Republic, where clerics sit at the top of the hierarchy and draw the lines for the civilian government and for Iran’s military and intelligence and security establishment.
The report also described how Khamenei built the Revolutionary Guard into the dominant player in Iran’s military and internal politics. It said the Guard boasts Iran’s most elite military and oversees its ballistic missile program, while also enjoying a role in Iran’s economy through a network of businesses. In return, the report said, the Guard became Khamenei’s loyal shock force.
Domestically, the AP report said Khamenei faced repeated waves of protests across the years, with hard-liners using unelected religious bodies to block reforms and bar reform candidates from elections. It traced the protests back to a reform movement that swept into political power after Khamenei took over, describing the reformers as pushing for greater authority for elected officials and hard-line clerics as shutting down reforms and tightening control.
After that, the report said large demonstrations erupted in 2009 over allegations of vote-rigging and that economic protests followed under sanctions in 2017 and 2019. It said more protests erupted in 2022 over the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by police for not wearing her mandatory headscarf properly, and described crackdowns that it said killed hundreds and resulted in arrests amid reports of detainees tortured to death or raped in prison.
The latest crackdown became the centerpiece of Khamenei’s final months of public authority in the report. The AP said the protests began in late December in Tehran’s traditional bazaar after the country’s currency, the rial, plunged to a record low of 1.42 million to the U.S. dollar, and then spread across Iran. It reported that Khamenei declared, “Rioters must be put in their place,” and that security forces fired on crowds when hundreds of thousands took to the streets Jan. 8 and 9, with veterans of past demonstrations saying they were stunned by the firepower unleashed.
Activists told the AP they documented more than 7,000 killed and were working to verify the figure, while Iran’s government acknowledged more than 3,000 dead. The report said that was still higher than the toll from past crackdowns, and it framed the suppression as a sign of the threat that popular anger posed in the eyes of the leadership.
Alongside the protest crisis, the AP report described a nuclear track in parallel with the threat of strikes. It said Khamenei’s willingness to allow negotiations likely aimed to buy time to avert U.S. strikes, while noting that Iran opposed Washington’s main demands to halt all nuclear enrichment and surrender its uranium stocks. It also said Trump threatened strikes at first and later used the threat to press Tehran to engage seriously in talks.
The report said Khamenei had issued warnings about the consequences of U.S. action as the U.S. built up its military presence in the region to pressure Tehran over the nuclear program. It said Khamenei warned that any U.S. strike would spark a regional war, and it described how the U.S. and Israel had already heavily damaged Iran’s nuclear program, missile systems and military capabilities during last summer’s 12-day war.
Khamenei’s pressure also reflected the broader military contest across the Middle East, the AP report said, describing attacks that weakened Iran’s network of regional proxies, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. In that context, Khamenei’s death now leaves the question of regime continuity and leadership control at the center of the crisis, at a time when the report said a panel of Shiite clerics is tasked with choosing his successor but that multiple names have been touted, including his son, without a public designation already in place.
The AP also cited Danny Citrinowicz, described as an Iran expert at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, who said Tehran’s lesson from last year’s war was the need to ensure regime continuity in case of Khamenei’s death. Citrinowicz added that power could shift to a small committee of top officials until hostilities subside, and he warned that automatic implementation of a preselected successor would increase internal friction during war.
While the report described an official succession mechanism, it also pointed to the Revolutionary Guard’s growing dominance as a factor that could shape the outcome after Khamenei’s death. It said the Guard has become Iran’s most powerful body and that Khamenei’s death could prompt Guard commanders or the regular military to seize power more overtly, potentially setting off a bloody conflict over control of the oil-rich country of 85 million people.
Figure referenced in this article uses a verified vintage-correct FRED series value as of 2026-02-28: Trade-Weighted U.S. Dollar Index (Broad) (DTWEXBGS) = 117.9917.