When he appeared in public for the first time in five years in October, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, had an uncompromising message. Israel “won’t last long”, he told tens of thousands of supporters at a mosque in Tehran in a Friday sermon.
“We must stand up against the enemy while strengthening our unwavering faith,” the 84-year-old told the gathering.
Days before, Israel had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran secretary general of Hezbollah, with huge bombs dropped on the militant Islamist movement’s headquarters in Beirut. The assassination was a personal blow to Khamenei, who had known Nasrallah for decades.
The Israeli air offensive against Iran, launched on Friday, is another such blow. It has prompted more defiance from Tehran, and a barrage of missiles and drones launched at Tel Aviv, but neither appear likely to stop the Israeli attacks. Iran’s air defences are apparently ineffective and the coalition of Islamist militias that Khamenei had built up to deter Israel is effectively shattered.
Khamenei now has few good options – a situation this careful, pragmatic, conservative and ruthless revolutionary has always sought to avoid.
Born the son of a minor cleric of modest means in the eastern Iranian shrine city on Mashhad, Khamenei took his first steps as a radical in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1960s. The then shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had launched a major reform project largely rejected by the country’s conservative clergy.
As a young religious student in Qom, a centre of theology, Khamenei had soaked in the traditions of Shia Islam and the radical new thinking of the emerging leader of the conservative opposition, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By the late 1960s, Khamenei was running secret missions for Khomeini, who had been exiled, and organising networks of Islamist activism.
Khamenei soaked up other influences too. Though an avowed aficionado of western literature, particularly Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck, the young activist was steeped in the anti-colonial ideologies of the time and the anti-western sentiment that often went with them. He met thinkers who sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create new ideologies, liked works describing the “westoxification” of his country and translated works by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who would inspire generations of Islamist extremists, into Farsi.
Imprisoned repeatedly by Iran’s feared security services, Khamenei was nonetheless able to take part in the vast protests of 1978 that eventually convinced the shah to flee and allowed Khomeini to return. A protege of the implacable cleric, he swiftly rose up the hierarchy of the radical regime that seized power and by 1981, after surviving an assassination attempt that deprived him of the use of an arm, he had won election to the largely ceremonial post of president.
When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was selected as his successor, once the constitution changed to allow someone of lesser clerical qualifications to take on the role and with much greater powers than before. Khamenei swiftly deployed these to consolidate his control over the sprawling and fragmented apparatus of Iran’s post-revolutionary state.
One key power base was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the beating activist heart of the new regime and a powerful military, social and economic force. But Khamenei, as ever, was careful to find other powerful allies and clients too.
Through the 1990s, he further strengthened his grip, eliminating opponents and rewarding those loyal to him. Even poets Khamenei had once professed to admire were targeted by security services. Overseas dissidents were hunted down, and the relationship with Hezbollah, which the IRGC had helped found in the aftermath of the revolution, was reinforced.
At all times he followed his strategy of pragmatically advancing the inflexible principles of the project bequeathed him by his late mentor.
When in 1997, Mohammad Khatami, a reformist candidate won the presidency in a landslide, Khamenei allowed him some freedom of action but worked hard and often forcefully to protect the core of the regime and its ideology from any serious challenge.
Khamenei did not, however, stop Khatami reaching out to Washington in an ultimately abortive effort to establish better relations in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and, following Khomenei’s example, forswore weapons of mass destruction.
But he also backed the IRGC’s efforts to bleed US forces in Iraq after their 2003 invasion and extend Iranian influence in the neighbouring country. This marked the further extension of his strategy of relying on proxies to project power across the region and deter and threaten Israel, named Little Satan by the revolutionaries in 1979 as the Great Satan of the US.
Khamenei was sceptical of the nuclear deal painstakingly negotiated by Iranian officials with the US and others, but he did not oppose its implementation in 2015. Analysts argue over whether he has sought to restrain or encourage hardliners in the IRGC who have pushed for Iran to acquire a bomb.
Successive waves of unrest and reform efforts have been met with surges of vicious repression alongside continuing harsh treatment of measures targeting women, gay people and religious minorities. This, along with deteriorating economic circumstances, have disillusioned many erstwhile supporters of the regime and broadened existing unrest.
Overseas, Khamenei chose to invest heavily in the so-called axis of resistance – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen and a motley assortment of Islamic militant militias in Syria and Iraq. This may have seemed a clever tactic but it has collapsed under the weight of Israeli attacks, while Iran’s historic alliance with Damascus was ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December.
Living in a compound with his wife and children on Palestine Street in Tehran, Khamenei has stressed his humble lifestyle. Some sceptics have doubted whether his asceticism is quite as authentic as presented, but his reputation for modesty, which contrasts with the ostentatious wealth of many other officials, has deflected some popular anger.
For more than three decades in power, Khamenei has sought to navigate the pressures of conflicting forces within Iran, to avoid outright war and to preserve Khomeini’s legacy – as well as his own power and that of his immediate loyalists, of course.
He is now ailing. Speculation over a successor is rife. A long career is drawing to a close with an old man’s greatest challenge yet. The brutal balancing act may soon be over.
