Who is Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and Israel’s Enemy No 1?

Israel, on Friday, launched its biggest attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It eliminated three powerful men – the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, the chief of staff of its armed forces, Mohammad Bagheri and a senior advisor of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Ali Shamkhani. Now reports say that Israel had plans to kill the most powerful man in the Islamic Republic – the ayatollah himself.

However, US President Donald Trump intervened and rejected the plan, three US officials told CBS News. Trump reportedly told the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that assassinating Khamenei was “not a good idea”, according to one official. Trump has not publicly commented on the report, and Netanyahu has not confirmed or denied it either.

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Now, a new report claims that Khamenei moved to an underground bunker in Lavizan in northeastern Tehran hours after Friday’s assault. He is accompanied by his family, including his son Mojtaba, two sources told Iran International.

“With this crime, the Zionist regime has set itself for a bitter and painful fate, and it will definitely receive it,” Khamenei said in a statement after Israel launched Operation Rising Lion.

Since then, the two countries have been constantly attacking each other, with the conflict now entering Day 4.

So, who is Khamenei, the man who calls the shots in Iran?

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The early life of Khamenei

Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, a religious centre in Iran. He was the second son of Sayyed Javad Khamenei, described by Ali as “a humble and poor Islamic scholar” and an “ascetic”.

After studying initially at seminaries in his home city, he moved to the Shia holy city of Qom. And in 1962, he joined the religious opposition movement of Ayatollah Khomeini against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

He soon became a devoted follower of Khomeini. In fact, Iran’s current supreme leader says that everything he has done and believes is derived from Khomeini’s vision of Islam. He was arrested numerous times in the 1960s and 1970s, spending several years in prison where he was tortured by the Savak secret police.

In June 1981, while he was giving a speech in the Abouzar Mosque, a bomb, concealed in a tape recorder, exploded beside him, leaving him paralysed in his right arm. In the same year, after one president was impeached and a second assassinated, Khamenei was asked by the revolutionary elites to run for president. He served the maximum two terms — from 1981 to 1989. The Iran-Iraq war broke out amid his tenure, making it the most significant part of his reign.

Ascension as Iran’s supreme leader

When Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989, there was no heir apparent. This was because he had fired him just months before his demise. It was then that Ali Khamenei emerged as the default choice to become the new supreme leader. His appointment was opposed by some senior clerics who felt he was unqualified, but the Assembly of Experts eventually approved him.

Iran’s constitution was amended to say the supreme leader had to show “Islamic scholarship”, enabling Ali Khamenei to be selected. The BBC reports that he was also elevated overnight from the clerical rank of Hojjat al-Islam to ayatollah.

Furthermore, the constitution was changed in order to abolish the position of prime minister and vest more powers in the presidency.

By the powers vested in me…

Today, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei is the most powerful man in Iran. He has constitutional authority over the judiciary, the regular armed forces and the elite Revolutionary Guards, and the state-controlled media.

Moreover, he heads Iran’s 12-member Guardian Council, which has the authority to vet electoral candidates and veto parliamentary decisions.

The constitution of Iran also empowers him to develop the general policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and declare war and peace, and mobilise armed forces. He also decides Iran’s foreign policy and makes decisions on its economy. It has been to refashion the economy and make it more resistant to international sanctions — what he dubs as the ‘economy of resistance’.

To achieve this mission, Iran seeks to rely on outside states such as China and Russia, as well as neighbours such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

But despite his powers, Khamenei has faced troubles from the presidents and other officials of his country. One name worth mentioning here is Akbar Rafsanjani, who had initially helped in Khamenei’s rise to power. As one Iranian academic told Inews, “Khamenei never forgave the the Rafsanjani-Rouhani alliance for promoting some degree of rapprochement with the decadent West, and that’s why he ordered the death of Rafsanjani, the person who made him the supreme leader.”

Another noteworthy name was Mohammad Khatami, who was in office between 1997 and 2005. He pushed for social and political freedom in Iran, but was blocked by Khamenei.

Khamenei’s hate for the US and Israel

Since ascending to the top position in Iran, Khamenei has been wary of the West, especially the United States and Israel. When he was president in 1981, he had vowed to stamp out “deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists”.

Moreover, when Donald Trump abandoned the nuclear accord in 2018, he had said: “I said from the first day: don’t trust America.”

According to Khamenei, Washington seeks a patron-client relationship with Iran that existed during the Pahlavi monarchy. In fact, he’s not as concerned about a US military invasion, but, as carnegieendowment.org notes, a political and cultural campaign to undermine theocratic rule through a “soft” or “velvet” revolution.

Iran’s supreme leader also views Israel and the US as the two sides of the same coin. He has repeatedly called for the elimination of the state of Israel, and in 2018, described the country as a “cancerous tumour” that had to be removed from the region.

The Supreme Leader has also been a sceptic of the Holocaust. In 2014, he wrote on his social media feed: “The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain, and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened.”

His hatred for Israel has also led him to call the Jewish nation a terrorist base. “Israel is not a country, but a terrorist base against the nation of Palestine and other Muslim nations,” he’s been quoted as saying, adding: Fighting this despotic regime is fighting oppression and terrorism, and (doing so) is everyone’s duty,” he added.

In the aftermath of the deadly attacks perpetrated by Hamas last October, which led to the ongoing war in Gaza, an adviser to Khamenei said, “We congratulate the Palestinian fighters. We will stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.”

Al-Monitor also quoted the Iranian leader hailed Hamas for the “epic” victory and the “destructive earthquake” it inflicted upon Israel.

And following Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital, he had promised revenge, saying Israel would be punished. “The evil Zionist regime will be punished at the hands of our brave men. We will make them regret this crime and the other ones,” Khamenei said in a message published on his official website.

He made a public appearance in October for the first time in five years, days after the killing of Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah. Then the supreme leader warned that Israel “won’t last long”. Now, he faces the biggest threat to his life in years.

With inputs from agencies