Post #5248

Ali Khamenei, Man Down 🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has died aged 86 in a large-scale air attack on the country by the US and Israel. He presided over a complex theocratic system that was enforced brutally at home, and sought to influence the exercise of power in other Middle Eastern countries. Though the US and Israel attempted to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme with a bombing campaign in June 2025, it was not fully successful. The economy continued to deteriorate, and the following January the country’s people took to the streets against the Islamic Republic. An estimated 30,000 or more protesters were killed – the largest death toll in modern Iranian history. Trump considered discussions with Khamenei’s diplomats about the nuclear issue and missile production to be unproductive. In announcing the new attack, he called on Iranians to do what they could to take over the government once it was over. Khamenei had come to ultimate power in 1989, by which point he was already the country’s president. Iran’s 88-strong assembly of experts – senior Shia clerics – chose him to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrower of the Shah in 1979 and founder of the Islamic Republic, as supreme leader of Iran. Thereafter Khamenei had absolute power and the final say in Iran’s future, whether in regard to its controversial nuclear programme or detente with the west. He was not only commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces, which includes the regular artesh (army) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), but also headed the “axis of resistance” – an anti-western and anti-Israel alliance made up of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthi rebels eventually occupying western Yemen, and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Thus his rule had a direct impact on much of the region, and under his leadership the Islamic Republic of Iran became one of the world’s biggest state sponsors of terrorism. It remained a significant force even despite Hamas’s loss of strength as a result of Israel’s reprisals in response to the attack on 7 October 2023, Hezbollah’s setbacks after attacks by Israel in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in 2024. #khamenei#death#hezbollah#iran#attack#israel#trump 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸