Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is killed in Israeli strike, ending 36-year iron rule
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Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in Israeli attacks, with U.S. support, on Saturday. He was 86 years old.
President Trump announced the Iranian leader's death on social media, saying Khamenei could not avoid U.S. intelligence and surveillance. A source briefed on the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran told NPR earlier Saturday that an Israeli airstrike killed Khamenei.
During his 36-year rule, Khamenei was unwavering in his steadfast antipathy to the U.S. and Israel and to any efforts to reform and bring Iran into the 21st century.
Khamenei was born in July 1939 into a religious family in the Shia Muslim holy city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran and attended theological school. An outspoken opponent of the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Khamenei was arrested several times.
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He was surrounded by other Iranian activists, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who became Iran's first supreme leader following the country's Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s.
Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981 that cost him the use of his right arm. He served as Iran's president before succeeding Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989.
Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., says Khamenei was an unlikely candidate. Then a midlevel cleric, Khamenei lacked religious credentials, which left him feeling vulnerable, Vatanka says.
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