Death of Iran’s Khamenei in strikes shakes Shiites from Pakistan to Lebanon

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The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in U.S.-Israeli strikes over the weekend did not remain confined to Iran. It quickly reverberated across countries where Shiite Muslims hold religious and political influence, raising fears among analysts of a broader backlash in the Middle East and beyond, with spillover into public anger, street unrest and cross-border attacks.

Within hours, demonstrations broke out in Pakistan, where thousands protested Khamenei’s death. Protesters tried to storm the U.S. Consulate in Karachi and clashed with police outside the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad where the U.S. Embassy is located, and they also attacked United Nations offices in northern cities, according to the Associated Press report. The clashes killed at least 34 people and left more than 120 injured, the report said. In remarks carried in the report, Syed Hussain Muqaddasi, head of the Pakistani Shiite political party Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqh-e-Jafariya, warned that if the United States and Israel were not stopped, “the entire world will turn into ruins.”

The AP reported that the effect of Khamenei’s death was also felt in Iraq, where demonstrators clashed with police near the U.S. Embassy. In Lebanon, the regional reverberations took a more military form: Hezbollah fired missiles toward Israel for the first time in over a year. Israel responded with intense airstrikes on Lebanon that killed dozens of people, while tens of thousands of residents fled homes in predominantly Shiite areas of southern and eastern Lebanon as Israeli threats of more strikes grew. Israel also called up 100,000 reservists and sent troops into southern Lebanon, the report said.

Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute, said the killing carried an immediate emotional and psychological component for Shiite communities and that developments in the days ahead would depend on how they tried to interpret what it meant. She also raised a specific worry about how Shiite minorities across the Middle East—“in particular … the Shia majority in Iraq”—might respond, describing the situation as early and uncertain.

Ozcelik suggested the potential for violence could be tempered by frustration among some Shiite populations with Iran’s long-running involvement in the affairs of other countries. She told the Associated Press that over the last five to 10 years, younger generations in Iraq in particular have shown resistance to what she called Iran’s “overwhelming penetration” of Iraq’s domestic affairs, including its security services, judiciary, politics and economy. Iran’s strategy of building alliances, the report said, has included working with not only states but also armed groups such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as armed groups in Iraq and Syria—interventions that critics have said undermine sovereignty and foster instability.

In assessing the likelihood of sectarian escalation, Ozcelik argued that sharp, violent sectarianism like the kind that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was less likely in the wake of Khamenei’s death. She pointed to a regional shift toward de-escalation, saying that the Middle East has “moved on” and that there is a “strong urge and desire for de-escalation at this point,” particularly in the Gulf.

The AP also placed Khamenei’s death within a wider pattern of targeted killings and leadership decapitation efforts involving Iran’s regional network. It cited previous assassinations of prominent figures, including Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, and veteran Iraqi militant Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad in 2020. It also cited the September 2024 killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a major Israeli airstrike south of Beirut.

Quincy Institute co-founder and executive vice president Trita Parsi said that after Khamenei’s assassination, Iran told the world it had “no red lines left,” describing the response as signaling the limits were removed in Tehran’s posture toward further confrontation. The AP reported that broader regional turmoil followed, with hundreds of missiles and drones flying across the Middle East and reaching as far as Cyprus, prompting United Arab Emirates and Qatar to scramble to shoot down Iranian weapons, shut airspace and ground commercial flights.

In Lebanon, residents and analysts interviewed by the Associated Press described the attacks as carrying a communal meaning beyond policy disputes. Nasser Khazal, whose building was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday in a suburb of Beirut, said there was “targeting of Muslims in general,” but that the targeting was “specifically directed at Shiites.” Lebanese political analyst Qassim Qassir described Iran’s retaliation as seen by some as a fight for Shiite survival against the U.S. and Israel’s vision for the region, and he said it amounted to “an existential war, whether in Iran, Lebanon, or Iraq.”

Late in the report, the Associated Press noted that the episode is part of a broader sequence of events unfolding across countries with large Shiite populations, and that the pace of retaliatory action and street mobilization appeared to be accelerating even as some analysts tried to identify constraints that could pull the region back from a wider sectarian conflagration.