MARK ALMOND: Ali Khamenei's dead hand remains on Iran's tiller

He was the great survivor of Iranian politics. But in the end his death was as violent as the terror and destruction he meted out to his own citizens and exported abroad.

It is thought that Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader whose despotic rule stretched over four decades, met his ‘martyrdom’, as state media have it, in the rubble of his Tehran compound. 

His reign featured arbitrary executions and imprisonments, terrorism and routine corruption which impoverished tens of millions in an ‘oil-rich’ country, but Khamenei’s guiding star was always his hatred of Israel. And it was their bombs that levelled his now-smoking compound yesterday morning.

Khamenei’s death will come as cold comfort to the families of an estimated 40,000 Iranians who have been murdered by his feared Revolutionary Guard forces since protests erupted across the country in December. 

International condemnation followed and an American armada of warships steamed to the region. US President Donald Trump hoped a show of force would cow the Iranian regime into halting its nuclear enrichment and missiles programs but stalled negotiations in Oman and Geneva left him in no doubt as to the identity of the obstacle.

While US missiles rained down upon military targets, the Israeli Defence Forces were given the task of taking out the key figures of Khamenei’s regime, with their ace of spades the Ayatollah himself.

It was unfinished business for Tel Aviv from last June, when Israel and the US launched airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities until Trump finally called a halt to the 12-day campaign. 

It left Khamenei’s regime bruised and bloodied, but he had still been able to reappear from his hiding place to declare victory over the American ‘Great Satan’ and its Israeli ally.

No longer.

Few would have predicted the turbulent career of the future Ayatollah, when Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born in the north-eastern Iranian holy city of Mashad in April, 1939. His father, a minor Muslim cleric, was an ethnic Azeri and his mother Persian, but his parents, like millions of Iranians, were united by the Shiite Muslim faith.

Their country was then ruled by the secular military dictator, Reza Pahlavi I, who seized power in 1926 and tried to Westernise Iran, not least by banning the black chador, a head-to-toe veil for women that made only the face visible.

As a teenager at school, young Khamenei was conscious that his traditional clothes and hand-me-down cloak marked him out as poor compared to the other boys who wore Western shirts and trousers. 

He read Western literature, too. He devoured translations John Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (though the Lloyd Weber musical version was banned), captivated by their message about how the poor live under the heel of the rich.

But it was his religiosity rather than his class that made Ali Khamenei into a revolutionary. At 19, he went to the religious centre of Iran at Qom to study with a firebrand critic of the Shah called Ruhollah Khomeini.

Like many radicals, Khamenei would undergo brutal treatment at the hands of the Shah’s secret police, and suffering torture does not make men tolerant. 

Khamenei’s generation came out of prison convinced that their pain entitled them to inflict it on those who really deserved it – which became an ever-growing number over the long years Khamenei would be in power.

Like his teacher Khomeini, the young Khamenei spent time in exile in Iraq at the key sites associated with the founding martyrs of Shiite Islam including the figure of Imam Hossein (who gave Khamenei his second name, Hosseini).

After the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, Khamenei navigated the early years of the revolution, buffeted by power struggles, by remaining loyal to the new Ayatollah Khomeini and turning him against potential rivals. 

In 1981, Khamenei became second president of the new Islamic Republic by joining the witch-hunt against his predecessor Bani Sadr who fled abroad where he was eventually assassinated.

No doubt Khamenei regarded his escape from death in 1981 when a bomb attack by rival radicals paralysed his right arm as evidence of divine grace, though it was a nagging painful disability for the rest of his life.

During the 1980s, the issue that would haunt Iran until today became acute: should the country develop nuclear weapons? Then, the enemy was Iraq whose leader Saddam Hussein rained death on Iranians through missiles and chemical weapons in a brutal war that would last most of the decade.

Khameini, like his boss the Ayatollah, opposed spending billions on a long-term weapons project, which would take years to come to fruition when the Iraqi threat was so immediate. He fell out with his prime minister, Mir Hussein Mousavi, who advocated for an Iranian bomb before his dismissal in 1989.

That year Khamenei became the Supreme Leader of both state and religion as Grand Ayatollah following the death Khomeini.

Mousavi would reappear in 2009 as leader of the so-called Green opposition to Khamenei’s favoured presidential candidate. Mousavi galvanised the first large-scale street protests, which were mercilessly broken up by the Basij religious police and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, of which Khamenei had been a founder member in 1979.

The rigid gender rules imposed by the Islamic Republic became increasingly resented in the 21st century as Iranian women chafed at the contradiction between being allowed to study at universities – actually a higher percentage than men by the 2020s – but denied equality in other spheres of society.

The murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s religious morality policy, who had arrested her for not wearing a hijab, led to nationwide protests in 2022 under the banner of ‘Women, Life, Freedom’. But this too was put down.

A wave of Muslim piety had swept the Ayatollahs to power in 1979, but under Khamenei’s long reign as Supreme Leader after 1989, religious practice among Iranians waned. State TV could show large crowds chanting the regime’s slogans but attendance at Friday prayers slumped to around 35 per cent at best by the 2020s and many mosques closed for lack of congregations.

Worse still was the widespread view that the clerical regime was deeply hypocritical. Just as corruption had gnawed away at the Shah’s regime, so years of absolute power and censorship had encouraged cynicism and self-serving in the hierarchy under Khamenei. 

He tolerated it because it rewarded his friends and bought off troublemakers. But the culture encouraged everyone to have a price, even when approached by Israel’s Mossad spies.

Tel Aviv’s extraordinary ability to know Tehran’s deepest secrets and track its most important political, military and scientific personnel showed that the Ayatollah had ignored warnings.

The first non-mullah to be Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shared Khamenei’s ravings against Israel and the West but he was regarded as too pushy by the Ayatollah, who ignored his warnings about Israeli penetration of the Islamic Republic.

‘Mossad is nearer to us than our own ears,’ Ahmadinejad had warned. But Khamenei wouldn’t hear of it, so much so that he failed to realise that his head of the anti-Mossad department of Iranian security was, in fact, an Israel agent – along with 20 of his staff.

Western foreign policy analysts sniggered at such ‘paranoid conspiracy thinking’ as much as Khamenei, but Israel’s waves of targeted killings on leading Iranian figures in their supposedly secret bolt-holes or in anonymous cars travelling between them shows how naively self-confident the Ayatollah had been.

During the war with Israel last June, Khamenei was sequestered from public view, hidden in a bunker as he was when Covid struck in 2020 – such was his fear of catching the disease that had ripped through the country. 

But this left him vulnerable to a possible putsch. Many radical Revolutionary Guards had long criticised Khamenei’s decision to develop the components of nuclear bomb – atomic warheads, detonators and missiles – without bringing them together into a workable weapon.

Saddam’s Iraq was no longer a mortal threat. Instead Israel and Saudi Arabia were jostling Iran for regional supremacy and the spectre of American invasion loomed larger since its war in Iraq.

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Regional power and security could only be achieved by being a nuclear-armed country, but Khamenei insisted that Allah forbade the use of weapons of mass destruction – a foolish caveat that was never going to deter Israel and the West from stopping Iran developing a bomb.

From his bunker last June, Khamenei had to surrender his authority as Supreme Commander to a team of new Revolutionary Guard commanders. Belatedly, he recognised his lack of foresight in not naming a successor much earlier (perhaps fearing his chosen crown prince would become a rival).

In the immediate aftermath of US-Israeli ceasefire last June, Khamenei instituted a savage purge of those he suspected were Israeli spies and saboteurs. 

But it was as much about silencing those who criticised him for leading Iran into such a vulnerable position.

Eight months on, those of his enemies still alive will not mourn his death. But they will be deeply wary as to what comes next. A power struggle among would-be successors to replace Khamenei will shatter the Islamic Republic’s cohesion, which many fear will lead to civil war. 

Yet his powerful allies will lean on his propaganda image as a divinely inspired leader to justify keeping the regime he created intact under new management.

Ali Khamenei’s dead hand could remain on the tiller for a while yet.