By Lee Keat
CAIRO (AP) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has faced his biggest challenge to yet. During his more than three decades in office, he has constantly crushed internal threats.
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Israel, his fiercest adversary, has gained complete control of Iran’s skies and is using its punitive air campaign to destroy the nation’s nuclear program and military leadership. Additionally, it poses a threat to his life: Israel Katz, the Israeli Defense Minister, stated that Khamenei cannot survive.
The 86-year-old boss has to make a decision. He might risk even more harm from Israeli bombardment and intensify Iran’s reaction against Israel. Or he might try to find a diplomatic way to keep the United States out of the war and possibly have to abandon the nuclear program that he has made the focal point of Iranian policy for years.
He sounded defiant in a video speech on Wednesday, promising that the Iranian people are not willing to give up and cautioning that the United States would cause them irreversible harm if it intervened.
Here are some facts on Khamenei:
As the successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, Khamenei had to overcome strong skepticism about his authority when he came to office in 1989. Khamenei was a low-level cleric at the time and lacked the religious credentials of his predecessor. He also lacked his blazing charisma with his thick glasses and sluggish manner.
However, Khamenei has reigned for three times as long as the late Khomeini and has arguably had a more significant impact on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He solidified the Shiite Muslim clerics’, or mullahs’, system of governance. In the view of hardliners, that cemented his position as the supreme authority, second only to God. Khamenei simultaneously turned the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard into the main political and military power in Iran.
The Guard is in charge of Iran’s ballistic missile program and has the country’s most prestigious military. The Quds Force, its international branch, put together the Axis of Resistance, a network of pro-Iranian proxies that spanned Yemen to Lebanon and gave Iran significant regional influence for many years. Additionally, Khamenei gave the Guard carte blanche to establish a network of companies that would enable it to control Iran’s economy.
The Guard became his faithful shock force in exchange.
The reform movement, which quickly gained a majority in parliament and the presidency after Khamenei assumed the position of supreme leader, posed the first significant challenge to his hold. The movement promoted granting elected officials more authority, which Khamenei’s hard-line adherents worried would result in the system of the Islamic Republic being overthrown.
Khamenei mobilized the clerical elite to thwart the reformists. The mullahs’ unelected bodies were successful in halting significant reforms and preventing reformers from standing for office.
Following the defeat of the reform movement, waves of protests were put down by Iran’s security forces, including the Revolutionary Guard. Allegations of vote-rigging in 2009 sparked massive statewide protests. In 2017 and 2019, economic protests erupted under the weight of sanctions. Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022 sparked more widespread protests when she was arrested by police for failing to wear her required hijab.
Reports of detainees being raped or tortured to death in prison led to hundreds of arrests and hundreds of deaths during crackdowns on the rallies.
Nevertheless, the subsequent demonstrations exposed the weaknesses in Iran’s theocratic system and exposed the general discontent with clerical control, corruption, and economic difficulties. Authorities frequently relaxed the implementation of some of the Islamic Republic’s social prohibitions in an effort to calm tensions.
Iran was only recovering from a protracted war with Iraq that left the nation devastated and alone when Khamenei came to power.
Khamenei transformed Iran into an assertive state with sway over the Middle East during the course of the following three decades. The 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the United States, which ultimately resulted in the rise of Shiite politicians and militias with Iranian ties in Iraq, was one significant boost.
Iraq served as a pivotal point in Iran’s Axis of Resistance, which included the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, and Bashar Assad’s Syria. When the alliance peaked in 2015, Iran was right outside Israel’s door.
When Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel retaliated heavily in the Gaza Strip. It also resulted in a change in Israeli policy. Israel decided to crush Iran’s friends after years of attempting to repel and subdue them. Even at the expense of Gaza’s destruction, Hamas has been severely damaged but not completely destroyed.
With weeks of bombardment in Lebanon last year and a spectacular strike using booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies that surprised the group, Israel has similarly put Hezbollah on the defensive, at least for the time being. Hezbollah suffered an even greater setback in December when Sunni insurgents overran the city and ousted Assad. Now, Damascus is home to a government that is antagonistic to both Iran and Hezbollah.
The Axis of Resistance against Iran is at its lowest point ever.
