Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, died Sunday at age 86, Iranian state media reported, according to the Associated Press. AP reported that the death followed a major attack launched by Israel and the United States. Hours earlier, AP reported, U.S. President Donald Trump said Khamenei had been killed in a joint operation.
Iran’s state media said Khamenei was killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes, according to AP. AP described Khamenei as the central figure who assembled theocratic power in Iran over decades, pushing the Islamic Republic into confrontation with Israel and the United States over Iran’s nuclear program and seeking to crush democracy protests. The AP report also said Khamenei’s death came after the large-scale attack on Saturday.
AP reported that Khamenei’s death raises questions about the future of Iran’s system of rule. The 88-seat Assembly of Experts—described by AP as a group of mostly hard-line clerics—will choose the next supreme leader, but AP said no clear successor is in place. AP also said that what happens next may depend heavily on the Revolutionary Guard, which AP described as having shown its willingness to use overwhelming force to keep power even as many of Iran’s roughly 90 million people become disenchanted.
AP reported that the government declared 40 days of public mourning and a seven-day nationwide public holiday to commemorate Khamenei’s death. The announcement of the death, AP said, also followed longstanding pressures that had built in Iran during Khamenei’s tenure, including political repression, economic strain, and waves of mass protests.
AP traced Khamenei’s rise from his birth in Mashhad into a religious family, and his study under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at Qom in the early 1960s. AP reported that Khamenei joined the anti-shah movement and faced imprisonment and time in hiding, and that after Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and proclaimed the Islamic Republic, Khamenei was appointed to the Revolutionary Council. AP said Khamenei was elected Iran’s third president in 1981, and that a bombing by opponents left him with one hand paralyzed.
AP said that after Khomeini’s death, Khamenei was named supreme leader and moved quickly in religious rank. AP described him as having weaker religious credentials than Khomeini and as holding the “hojatolislam” rank earlier in life, and said that after becoming supreme leader he had to address skepticism about his credentials. AP also reported a quote from Khamenei’s first speech in the post in which he described himself as “an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian.”
AP said Khamenei stabilized Iran after the 1980s war with Iraq and ruled for over three decades, while hard-liners considered him a central authority. AP said he created an ever-growing bureaucracy of Shiite clerics and governmental agencies and that responsibilities blurred so that Khamenei remained the ultimate arbiter, and it said he moved to preserve the Revolutionary Guard after the war. AP described the Guard as a military and business behemoth with a central role in the country’s economy and as part of its ballistic missile arsenal.
In its description of Khamenei’s regional strategy, AP said Iran shifted toward supporting proxy forces and built an “Axis of Resistance.” AP said that Hezbollah, established with Iran’s help in the 1980s, fought Israel and drove Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, and that Iran used a similar model with Yemen’s Houthis after 2014. AP also described Iran’s support for other allied militants across conflicts and said that the “Axis of Resistance” built by Khamenei faced collapse as regional wars escalated—reporting that Israel and Iran attacked each other directly for the first time in 2024 and that Israel struck Iran again in June 2025 while the United States and Israel targeted Iran’s nuclear program and killed top military officers and nuclear scientists.
AP reported that Khamenei remained deeply suspicious of the United States and referred to it as the “Great Satan,” even after President Barack Obama took office in 2009. AP said Khamenei pushed ahead with Iran’s nuclear program, which AP described as involving concerns that Iran hid a secret project to build a nuclear weapon up until 2003, and that he issued a verbal fatwa saying nuclear weapons were un-Islamic while vowing Iran would never give up its right to develop a “peaceful nuclear energy program.” AP said the 2015 nuclear deal reduced Tehran’s stockpile and uranium enrichment in exchange for lifting sanctions, but that AP said Trump withdrew from the accord in his first term, and that Iran later broke the deal’s limits and accumulated uranium enriched to nearly weapons-grade levels.
AP also described how protests and demands for change intensified during Khamenei’s rule. It said reformists gained control of parliament in 1997 and pushed for loosening strict social rules and improving ties with the outside world, while Khamenei-backed hard-liners moved to contain liberalization. AP described mass protests in 2009 after the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and said the ensuing crackdown involved the Revolutionary Guard, Basij militia and police. AP also said later crackdowns followed economic protests and demonstrations related to gasoline price increases.
AP reported that protests erupted again in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained for not wearing her headscarf properly, and AP said more than 500 people were killed and tens of thousands arrested when security forces crushed demonstrations. AP said protests again escalated in late December 2025 into a major movement across the country demanding an end to the Islamic Republic, and it said some protesters chanted for the return of the shah’s son, who has lived in exile since 1979. As covered earlier, MSI previously reported that Iran’s leadership, weakened by war, faced broad protests alongside crackdowns that killed hundreds in January.
AP reported that as Khamenei faced escalating confrontation with the United States, Trump renewed threats during the crackdown on nationwide protests in January and demanded Iran make major concessions at the negotiating table. AP said there were three rounds of indirect talks before the Saturday attack. AP also reported that during the period of rising tensions, U.S. President Trump renewed public pressure on Iranians, calling on them to “take over your government,” and saying, “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
AP reported that Khamenei’s daughter and son-in-law, along with a grandchild and a daughter-in-law, were also killed in the Saturday attack, citing semiofficial Fars news agency and unnamed sources. AP reported that Iranian officials framed the death as a major event and set a formal period of mourning as the country confronts succession and renewed regional conflict.