Ali Khamenei: the leader of a theocracy forged in blood and religious fanaticism

To know the complexity of some monsters, it is sometimes enough to look back to the beginning, especially when their lives come to an end. With Ayatollah Ali Khamenei it is inevitably essential, given the unimaginable damage he has done to an entire country and his sudden death following air strikes executed by Israel and the United States, his two greatest enemies.

Khamenei was only the second supreme leader of Iran since the so-called Islamic Revolution of 1979 and remained in office since 1989, consolidating for more than three decades an almost absolute power. Embedded in a complex web of rival powers, the Iranian leader had the power to veto virtually any public policy issue and to handpick candidates for public office, allowing him to shape the political system of an entire country to his convenience. As head of state and commander-in-chief of the Army - which includes the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - his position made him a figure with powers that very few leaders throughout the world can attain. At the same time, he was the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Born in 1939 in Mashhad, the Persian nation's second largest city, Jamenei was the second of eight children in a religious family. His father was a middle-ranking cleric of the Shiite branch of Islam, which is the dominant religious group in the country. His education focused primarily on the study of the Quran and he earned a clerical degree at the age of 11. Like many religious leaders of his generation, his role was from the outset both political and spiritual, being both a skilled and Machiavellian orator who would end up joining the critics of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the monarch overthrown by the so-called Islamic Revolution of 1979 led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

For years, Khamenei lived in hiding and was arrested on several occasions. Already by 1980, Khomeini appointed him leader of Friday prayers in Tehran, to be elected president a year later and eventually designated as the supreme leader's successor in 1989 after his death. It is a meteoric rise in a complex universe in which loyalty and fundamentalism are crucial to political ambition, and in which violence can strike at any moment, as it did in 1981, when a bomb attack by the opposition People's Mujahedin group caused injuries severe enough to cause him to lose the mobility of his right arm.

Promotion and control

Lacking the automatic respect of the high clergy and the charismatic popularity enjoyed by his predecessor, Ayatollah Khamenei had to tread cautiously at the beginning of his new era as the supreme leader of a country that was already beginning to feel betrayed and disappointed at the direction taken by the revolution. However, Khamenei began to weave over time networks of loyalists in the judiciary, the police, the state media, the clerical elite, the parliament, the Revolutionary Guard and the intelligence apparatus, thus consolidating a system that was fiercely aligned with his figure.

As other tyrants did, Jamenei managed to achieve almost indestructible power by creating an impenetrable core of illicitly enriched post-revolutionary Revolutionary Guards and hard-line clerics. Added to this, the supreme leader showed a permanent iron fist in responding against citizen demonstrations against his theocratic regime, with a security apparatus loyal enough not to hesitate for a second to commit all kinds of atrocities and barbarities in order to neutralize the protests and the opposition itself.

The clearest examples took place with the student protests of 1999, those of 2009 against rigged elections, those of 2019 following the sharp increase in gasoline, or those of 2022 following the brutal murder of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for the simple fact of not wearing the hijab. In each of these demonstrations, the forces of order were seen crushing again and again the will of a people aware of the nightmare in which their country has been involved and determined to see the end of the theocracy responsible for it.

Turning point and denouement

As happens in the life of every dictator and his dictatorship, there is a point of no return that ends up becoming the most delicate before and after. In this case, the main one was his decision to develop nuclear weapons, disguised as atomic energy programs and sophisticated missiles, putting both the Middle East and the world on tenterhooks in view of the chaos it would represent to see a violent and interfering theocracy such as the Iranian one counting on such a weaponry.

After failed negotiations and pusillanimous agreements that only favored the ayatollah and his regime, we reached the year 2025, when Israel took military action against the Iranian nuclear program, its scientists and facilities. Iran responded with missiles against Israel, until the Administration of President Donald Trump decided to join the Israeli attacks. While Khamenei vowed not to surrender, his position was weakened more than ever and his fate seemed all but doomed.

The final blow would come at the end of that year with the mass protests carried out throughout Iran, in which millions of Iranians would take to the streets of the country's major cities to express their absolute animosity for Khamenei and their desire to see his theocracy ended. As many feared, the regime's response was one of inhuman and disproportionate brutality, resulting in thousands of innocent deaths. The little favorability on which his image could count was finally collapsing, as well as the solidity of his power, in the face of the numerous internal contradictions that were beginning to emerge. This was the final circumstance that both the United States and Israel knew how to take advantage of to launch new attacks and finish him off.

Millions of words could be written to explain the life of a tyrant, to analyze the details of an existence framed by blood, power and fanaticism. However, even in the face of the inevitable chaos that can sometimes occur after the end, the death of a tyrant allows hope and the possibility of a future in which freedom replaces the unspeakable horror he built to set himself up as lord and master of a country, as its leader and eventual executioner.