The New Yorker:

The Supreme Leader has been killed by Israel and the United States. Can the regime survive without him?

By Robin Wright

Early Sunday morning, on a state-controlled television station, a bearded news anchor wept as he announced that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been “martyred,” at the age of eighty-six, on the first day of the war with the U.S. and Israel. Three times, between heaving sobs, the anchor shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” before reading the news from a white piece of paper. His hand shook. The U.S. reportedly provided the intelligence on Khamenei’s movements; Israeli fighter jets conducted the precision strike. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had destroyed “the compound of the tyrant Khamenei” which included the top political and military offices of Iranian leaders. In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump heralded, “one of the most evil people in History is dead.” He called it “Justice” for people and countries worldwide who had been victims of “Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS.”

In 1987, I had a working breakfast with Khamenei, then the President of Iran, when he came to speak at the U.N., on his only trip to the U.S. or the West. With oversized glasses, a long graying beard, and a black turban, he struck me then as unworldly, naïvely arrogant about theocratic rule, and defensively furious at America for past interventions in Iran. At one point, a member of the Revolutionary Guard came over to cut up Khamenei’s breakfast meat. Khamenei had lost the use of his right arm after a small bomb hidden in a tape recorder, planted by an opposition group, went off as he was giving a sermon seven years earlier.

Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, as the son of a mid-ranking cleric of modest means. From a young age, he was educated in seminaries, first in Iran and then in Najaf, Iraq, at the center of Shiite learning. He became a follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—and an opponent of the monarchy—after he returned to Iran. He was arrested six times. When I visited the Ebrat Museum, which was formerly an intelligence prison run by the Shah’s U.S.-trained secret police, savak, I saw a wax figure of Khamenei in what had been his cell. After the 1979 Revolution, Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, appointed Khamenei to lead Friday prayers, an influential position. After one President was impeached and another killed in a terrorist attack, Khamenei was elected President in 1981. In 1989, two years after we met, he was catapulted into the Islamic Republic’s top job following Khomeini’s abrupt death. Khamenei held ultimate power over political, military, judicial and economic policy for nearly four decades. It was one of the longest contemporary reigns in the world. But at the end of his life, he was secluded or hidden underground so much that Iranians nicknamed him Moushe-Ali, or Ali the Mouse.

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