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03-01 10:04
Buy oil
Iran State Television Confirms That Khamenei Is Dead
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Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Khamenei's death "would serve as the starting point for a great uprising against the tyrants of the world."</p><p>The undisputed leader of post-revolutionary Iran and spiritual leader of millions of Shiite Muslims, Khamenei developed the nation's nuclear program and built a once-powerful network of regional militant groups that Israel has been systematically dismantling for more than a year. His resistance to the U.S. and Israel resonated widely in the Middle East, even as it gradually fell out of step with large parts of Iran's population, many of whom despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance and wanted to escape the country's global isolation.</p><p>After taking power in 1989, despite domestic and foreign pressure, Khamenei built Iran into a formidable military and political power. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had left the nation bankrupt and humiliated, following an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, one of the deadliest global conflicts of the past century.</p><p>"When Khomeini died, the Islamic Republic was a dumpster fire," said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "Khamenei, through guile and persistence, was able to achieve something pretty miraculous. He turned Iran into a regional power that controlled a pretty wide geography."</p><p>An instrument for Khamenei's expansion was a network of armed groups in the Middle East that fought at Iran's behest, pinning down foes and providing Tehran with strategic space to prevent direct enemy attacks. At the height of Iran's expansion, it controlled a land corridor running from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, through which it could transport arms and personnel.</p><p>Khamenei's fortunes changed with what first appeared to be a victory: the attack led by Hamas, its Palestinian ally, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The deadliest single assault ever on Israel, it was heralded by Tehran as a testament to the strength of the alliance it had built from scratch, and brandished Khamenei's self-styled status as a flag bearer for the Palestinian people.</p><p>But the war Israel unleashed in response, in Gaza and beyond, set in motion a cascade of events that would diminish Iran's regional power and leave Khamenei exposed. The decapitation of close Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, and a series of Israeli strikes on Iran that killed some of its highest-ranking commanders, upended the entire Middle East.</p><p>At the time of his death, Khamenei no longer drove an expansion of Iranian power, but was working hard to salvage the pieces of the Islamic Republic.</p><p>His death leaves Iran at a precipice. Khamenei was the linchpin that held together hard-liners and more moderate elements of the Islamic Republic. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn't.</p><p>So critical was Iran's Supreme Leader to the nation's security that his health was considered a state secret, though state media said he had prostate surgery in 2014. Now Iran's leaders will have to navigate a transition of power, while confronting domestic discontent, economic hardship and external pressure for change from the U.S. and others.</p><p>Without him, Iranians are left in uncertainty. Khamenei's rule partly depended on being a guarantor of national security. Before Israel's military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries.</p><p>Iran kept hostile forces away from its soil for decades after the 1980-1988 war with Iraq -- which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including from chemical weapons deployed by Saddam Hussein. From the mid-2010s, while Islamic State killed tens of thousands in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the extremist group also carried out four major attacks in Iran, killing roughly 150 people -- fewer than it killed over the same period in France.</p><p>Iran's nuclear program brought Khamenei into conflict with Israel and the West. He reactivated the program in the 1990s, after it had been initiated by the Shah in the 1950s. The construction of atomic plants had stalled during the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq.</p><p>While the Supreme Leader repeatedly insisted the program was peaceful and issued a religious pronouncement asserting Iran wouldn't acquire nuclear arms, Western officials believe Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons until at least 2003. The fast pace of the program's development worried Western powers who imposed increasingly stringent trade restrictions.</p><p>While Khamenei expanded Iran's clout, economically he fared worse. International sanctions and government mismanagement prevented Iran from fully capitalizing on its immense natural resources. Its regional ambitions were a drain on its already stretched finances. Iran was often prevented from selling oil, its main export, and the wealth from what it did sell disproportionately enriched a small elite.</p><p>Iran under Khamenei did register progress in some important areas. It boasts some of the best healthcare and education in the region. Life expectancy increased to 77 years in 2023 from 62 in 1986, according to the World Bank. In the same period, Iran boosted female literacy rates to 81% from 41%. But millions of Iranians continue to live in poverty and lack jobs.</p><p>Neither a full-blown dictatorship nor a democracy, Iran's cleric-ruled system contains elements of both. Khamenei knew how to strike a balance to ensure his political survival. Allowing moderate forces a space in elections gave Khamenei a veneer of legitimacy, while political restrictions ensured that he never lost control.</p><p>"If he let democracy loose, he'd be removed," said Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, associate professor at Texas A&M University. "On the other hand, if he put an end to these things [such as elections], there could be a public revolt."</p><p>However, in recent presidential elections, the establishment sidelined scores of moderate and reformist candidates from running for the presidency, helping smooth a path to victory for candidates loyal to Khamenei. His growing reliance on hard-liners in the system put the Islamic Republic on an increasingly confrontational course with its enemies.</p><p>Khamenei held a pope-like position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God. His black turban, clerical robes and graying beard composed the picture that adorned offices, walls and billboards across the country.</p><p>To millions of Iranians, he maintained that authority until his death. Khamenei sought to guide the world's Muslims, not just Shiites, and said Iran wanted to usher in an Islamic revival that would sweep the region, "like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze."</p><p>For many people in the Middle East, Khamenei's touch didn't feel like a breeze. His strong-armed governance confined tens of thousands of critics to prison and drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians into exile.</p><p>His legacy will also be tainted by his stern support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during that country's civil war that broke out in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. For over a decade, Iran sent Revolutionary Guard forces to Syria and mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished militia fighters from neighboring countries to bolster Assad's war effort that centered on starving and bombing cities into submission.</p><p>Khamenei's virulent anti-Americanism came to the fore during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he ordered Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fund and train local militias. The armed groups, part of Iran's expanded footprint in the region, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, in addition to thousands of Iraqis.</p><p>"The presence of foreign troops is damaging for the Iraqis," Khamenei said in 2005. "The U.S. and Britain will eventually have to leave Iraq with a bitter experience."</p><p>Through propping up predominantly Shiite groups, Khamenei did more to sow sectarian strife among Muslims than to unite them, his critics say, and he damaged Shiite Islam in the process. As public unrest became more frequent during his rule, so did chants from protesters of "Death to Khamenei" or calls to stop funding Iran's allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.</p><p>"After Khamenei's regime, Iran is far more secular and critical of Shiism than when he came to power," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.</p><p>Despite his fundamentalist beliefs, Khamenei was a nimble politician. He survived waves of social change in Iran and multiple American administrations bent on undermining his rule.</p><p>He surrounded himself with advisers and military commanders who kept Iran largely safe from foreign threats. He was an early advocate of Iran's development of ballistic missiles, describing them as a weapon that could threaten Israel and counter the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.</p><p>A pragmatist as well as an ideologue, Khamenei endorsed diplomacy when convenient. He advocated for dialogue with the U.S. in Iraq and blessed an international nuclear deal in 2015, which granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program. He did so reluctantly.</p><p>"Negotiations are meaningful when the other side shows its goodwill," he said in 2008, addressing Washington. "You want to point a gun at the Iranian people and say, 'Negotiate, or I'll fire.'...You should know that the Iranian people will not be frightened as a result of such acts."</p><p>He reluctantly allowed the Iranian government to pursue nuclear negotiations with the West that would lift sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its enrichment activities. After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.</p><p>"I have been saying that the Americans cannot be trusted," he said in 2018. "With its calm appearance and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes."</p><p>In recent years, Khamenei also oversaw deepening ties with China and, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot toward the Kremlin. During the war in Ukraine, Iran became one of Russia's most steadfast supporters, voting against U.N. resolutions condemning Moscow and supplying it with weapons, particularly armed drones.</p><p>Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a Shiite religious scholar. His official biography says he grew up poor in a small house with "one room and a gloomy basement."</p><p>Khamenei left Mashhad in 1957 to attend seminary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. A year later, he returned to Iran to study in Qom, another important center of Shiite learning.</p><p>Though first and foremost a seminarian, Khamenei read widely and kept varied company. He met with secular Iranian intellectuals, with whom he shared an antipathy toward the U.S. and its support for the despotic shah of Iran. He was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni Egyptian theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood who propagated the idea of an Islamic Republic. Khamenei even translated several of Qutb's works into Persian.</p><p>He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings. He praised John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" for its descriptions of capitalist exploitation and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for the light it shed on slavery in the U.S. Above all, he admired Victor Hugo whose "Les Misérables" Khamenei called "a miracle in the world of novel writing."</p><p>In Qom, he studied under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose ideas would lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than a year after the revolution, the new clerical-led government dealt with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Khamenei was initially opposed to the seizure of 52 American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days, the late Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once said. Yet, in public, he defended it as necessary for cutting all ties with America.</p><p>The seizure of the U.S. Embassy, a proclaimed "den of espionage," became a tool for the revolutionaries to solidify their new anti-imperialist rule. It became a model they would follow in the coming decades of rallying public support during times of crises, and it set the tone for decades of hostile relations with Washington.</p><p>"The American hostage crisis set the direction. There was no real American threat in 1980 of a coup. This was a pure engineered crisis," said Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. "It created a cleavage with the United States that was really necessary."</p><p>Khamenei was elected president in 1981, during the tumultuous first years of the Islamic Republic. He held the position for eight years through the bloody war with Iraq, during a time when leftist opponents also staged a series of attacks against the Islamic Republic. Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, when explosives hidden in a tape recorder injured him and deprived him for life of the use of his right arm.</p><p>When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was considered theologically underqualified. But with a nudge from Rafsanjani, the kingmaker, he was picked by the Assembly of Experts as the new leader.</p><p>Lacking Ayatollah Khomeini's gravitas, Khamenei built his power by balancing Iran's various pillars of authority. External factors helped. High oil prices funded his authoritarian rule. The threat of military action from the U.S. reinforced his message that American administrations worked to overturn the Iranian system -- whether through regional wars, economic sanctions or support for domestic Iranian protest movements.</p><p>"An all-encompassing American plan has been arranged to collapse the Islamic Republic system," Khamenei told a group of Iranian government officials in 2000, according to the Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji.</p><p>In the 1990s and 2000s, Khamenei allowed for reformist governments to run for elections, and win, but he dealt harshly with dissidents. In 1999, plainclothes police raided a student dormitory following a demonstration, triggering days of mass protests. In 2009, security forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds when clamping down on nationwide protests known as the Green Movement. A decade later, when protesters in 2019 decried economic hardship, security forces killed hundreds over the course of a few days.</p><p>Khamenei lived his life arguing that the U.S. couldn't be trusted. He died, his supporters say, vindicated in that belief.</p></body></html>","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Iran State Television Confirms That Khamenei Is Dead</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nIran State Television Confirms That Khamenei Is Dead\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n<div class=\"head\" \">\n\n\n<div class=\"h-thumb\" style=\"background-image:url(https://static.tigerbbs.com/150f88aa4d182df19190059f4a365e99);background-size:cover;\"></div>\n\n<div class=\"h-content\">\n<p class=\"h-name\">Dow Jones </p>\n<p class=\"h-time\">2026-03-01 09:30</p>\n</div>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<html><head></head><body><p>Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday, the country's state television network confirmed.</p><p>The government announced a traditional 40 days of national mourning for Khamenei, who was 86 years old. Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Khamenei's death "would serve as the starting point for a great uprising against the tyrants of the world."</p><p>The undisputed leader of post-revolutionary Iran and spiritual leader of millions of Shiite Muslims, Khamenei developed the nation's nuclear program and built a once-powerful network of regional militant groups that Israel has been systematically dismantling for more than a year. His resistance to the U.S. and Israel resonated widely in the Middle East, even as it gradually fell out of step with large parts of Iran's population, many of whom despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance and wanted to escape the country's global isolation.</p><p>After taking power in 1989, despite domestic and foreign pressure, Khamenei built Iran into a formidable military and political power. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had left the nation bankrupt and humiliated, following an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, one of the deadliest global conflicts of the past century.</p><p>"When Khomeini died, the Islamic Republic was a dumpster fire," said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "Khamenei, through guile and persistence, was able to achieve something pretty miraculous. He turned Iran into a regional power that controlled a pretty wide geography."</p><p>An instrument for Khamenei's expansion was a network of armed groups in the Middle East that fought at Iran's behest, pinning down foes and providing Tehran with strategic space to prevent direct enemy attacks. At the height of Iran's expansion, it controlled a land corridor running from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, through which it could transport arms and personnel.</p><p>Khamenei's fortunes changed with what first appeared to be a victory: the attack led by Hamas, its Palestinian ally, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The deadliest single assault ever on Israel, it was heralded by Tehran as a testament to the strength of the alliance it had built from scratch, and brandished Khamenei's self-styled status as a flag bearer for the Palestinian people.</p><p>But the war Israel unleashed in response, in Gaza and beyond, set in motion a cascade of events that would diminish Iran's regional power and leave Khamenei exposed. The decapitation of close Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, and a series of Israeli strikes on Iran that killed some of its highest-ranking commanders, upended the entire Middle East.</p><p>At the time of his death, Khamenei no longer drove an expansion of Iranian power, but was working hard to salvage the pieces of the Islamic Republic.</p><p>His death leaves Iran at a precipice. Khamenei was the linchpin that held together hard-liners and more moderate elements of the Islamic Republic. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn't.</p><p>So critical was Iran's Supreme Leader to the nation's security that his health was considered a state secret, though state media said he had prostate surgery in 2014. Now Iran's leaders will have to navigate a transition of power, while confronting domestic discontent, economic hardship and external pressure for change from the U.S. and others.</p><p>Without him, Iranians are left in uncertainty. Khamenei's rule partly depended on being a guarantor of national security. Before Israel's military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries.</p><p>Iran kept hostile forces away from its soil for decades after the 1980-1988 war with Iraq -- which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including from chemical weapons deployed by Saddam Hussein. From the mid-2010s, while Islamic State killed tens of thousands in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the extremist group also carried out four major attacks in Iran, killing roughly 150 people -- fewer than it killed over the same period in France.</p><p>Iran's nuclear program brought Khamenei into conflict with Israel and the West. He reactivated the program in the 1990s, after it had been initiated by the Shah in the 1950s. The construction of atomic plants had stalled during the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq.</p><p>While the Supreme Leader repeatedly insisted the program was peaceful and issued a religious pronouncement asserting Iran wouldn't acquire nuclear arms, Western officials believe Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons until at least 2003. The fast pace of the program's development worried Western powers who imposed increasingly stringent trade restrictions.</p><p>While Khamenei expanded Iran's clout, economically he fared worse. International sanctions and government mismanagement prevented Iran from fully capitalizing on its immense natural resources. Its regional ambitions were a drain on its already stretched finances. Iran was often prevented from selling oil, its main export, and the wealth from what it did sell disproportionately enriched a small elite.</p><p>Iran under Khamenei did register progress in some important areas. It boasts some of the best healthcare and education in the region. Life expectancy increased to 77 years in 2023 from 62 in 1986, according to the World Bank. In the same period, Iran boosted female literacy rates to 81% from 41%. But millions of Iranians continue to live in poverty and lack jobs.</p><p>Neither a full-blown dictatorship nor a democracy, Iran's cleric-ruled system contains elements of both. Khamenei knew how to strike a balance to ensure his political survival. Allowing moderate forces a space in elections gave Khamenei a veneer of legitimacy, while political restrictions ensured that he never lost control.</p><p>"If he let democracy loose, he'd be removed," said Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, associate professor at Texas A&M University. "On the other hand, if he put an end to these things [such as elections], there could be a public revolt."</p><p>However, in recent presidential elections, the establishment sidelined scores of moderate and reformist candidates from running for the presidency, helping smooth a path to victory for candidates loyal to Khamenei. His growing reliance on hard-liners in the system put the Islamic Republic on an increasingly confrontational course with its enemies.</p><p>Khamenei held a pope-like position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God. His black turban, clerical robes and graying beard composed the picture that adorned offices, walls and billboards across the country.</p><p>To millions of Iranians, he maintained that authority until his death. Khamenei sought to guide the world's Muslims, not just Shiites, and said Iran wanted to usher in an Islamic revival that would sweep the region, "like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze."</p><p>For many people in the Middle East, Khamenei's touch didn't feel like a breeze. His strong-armed governance confined tens of thousands of critics to prison and drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians into exile.</p><p>His legacy will also be tainted by his stern support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during that country's civil war that broke out in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. For over a decade, Iran sent Revolutionary Guard forces to Syria and mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished militia fighters from neighboring countries to bolster Assad's war effort that centered on starving and bombing cities into submission.</p><p>Khamenei's virulent anti-Americanism came to the fore during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he ordered Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fund and train local militias. The armed groups, part of Iran's expanded footprint in the region, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, in addition to thousands of Iraqis.</p><p>"The presence of foreign troops is damaging for the Iraqis," Khamenei said in 2005. "The U.S. and Britain will eventually have to leave Iraq with a bitter experience."</p><p>Through propping up predominantly Shiite groups, Khamenei did more to sow sectarian strife among Muslims than to unite them, his critics say, and he damaged Shiite Islam in the process. As public unrest became more frequent during his rule, so did chants from protesters of "Death to Khamenei" or calls to stop funding Iran's allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.</p><p>"After Khamenei's regime, Iran is far more secular and critical of Shiism than when he came to power," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.</p><p>Despite his fundamentalist beliefs, Khamenei was a nimble politician. He survived waves of social change in Iran and multiple American administrations bent on undermining his rule.</p><p>He surrounded himself with advisers and military commanders who kept Iran largely safe from foreign threats. He was an early advocate of Iran's development of ballistic missiles, describing them as a weapon that could threaten Israel and counter the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.</p><p>A pragmatist as well as an ideologue, Khamenei endorsed diplomacy when convenient. He advocated for dialogue with the U.S. in Iraq and blessed an international nuclear deal in 2015, which granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program. He did so reluctantly.</p><p>"Negotiations are meaningful when the other side shows its goodwill," he said in 2008, addressing Washington. "You want to point a gun at the Iranian people and say, 'Negotiate, or I'll fire.'...You should know that the Iranian people will not be frightened as a result of such acts."</p><p>He reluctantly allowed the Iranian government to pursue nuclear negotiations with the West that would lift sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its enrichment activities. After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.</p><p>"I have been saying that the Americans cannot be trusted," he said in 2018. "With its calm appearance and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes."</p><p>In recent years, Khamenei also oversaw deepening ties with China and, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot toward the Kremlin. During the war in Ukraine, Iran became one of Russia's most steadfast supporters, voting against U.N. resolutions condemning Moscow and supplying it with weapons, particularly armed drones.</p><p>Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a Shiite religious scholar. His official biography says he grew up poor in a small house with "one room and a gloomy basement."</p><p>Khamenei left Mashhad in 1957 to attend seminary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. A year later, he returned to Iran to study in Qom, another important center of Shiite learning.</p><p>Though first and foremost a seminarian, Khamenei read widely and kept varied company. He met with secular Iranian intellectuals, with whom he shared an antipathy toward the U.S. and its support for the despotic shah of Iran. He was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni Egyptian theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood who propagated the idea of an Islamic Republic. Khamenei even translated several of Qutb's works into Persian.</p><p>He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings. He praised John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" for its descriptions of capitalist exploitation and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for the light it shed on slavery in the U.S. Above all, he admired Victor Hugo whose "Les Misérables" Khamenei called "a miracle in the world of novel writing."</p><p>In Qom, he studied under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose ideas would lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than a year after the revolution, the new clerical-led government dealt with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Khamenei was initially opposed to the seizure of 52 American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days, the late Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once said. Yet, in public, he defended it as necessary for cutting all ties with America.</p><p>The seizure of the U.S. Embassy, a proclaimed "den of espionage," became a tool for the revolutionaries to solidify their new anti-imperialist rule. It became a model they would follow in the coming decades of rallying public support during times of crises, and it set the tone for decades of hostile relations with Washington.</p><p>"The American hostage crisis set the direction. There was no real American threat in 1980 of a coup. This was a pure engineered crisis," said Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. "It created a cleavage with the United States that was really necessary."</p><p>Khamenei was elected president in 1981, during the tumultuous first years of the Islamic Republic. He held the position for eight years through the bloody war with Iraq, during a time when leftist opponents also staged a series of attacks against the Islamic Republic. Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, when explosives hidden in a tape recorder injured him and deprived him for life of the use of his right arm.</p><p>When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was considered theologically underqualified. But with a nudge from Rafsanjani, the kingmaker, he was picked by the Assembly of Experts as the new leader.</p><p>Lacking Ayatollah Khomeini's gravitas, Khamenei built his power by balancing Iran's various pillars of authority. External factors helped. High oil prices funded his authoritarian rule. The threat of military action from the U.S. reinforced his message that American administrations worked to overturn the Iranian system -- whether through regional wars, economic sanctions or support for domestic Iranian protest movements.</p><p>"An all-encompassing American plan has been arranged to collapse the Islamic Republic system," Khamenei told a group of Iranian government officials in 2000, according to the Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji.</p><p>In the 1990s and 2000s, Khamenei allowed for reformist governments to run for elections, and win, but he dealt harshly with dissidents. In 1999, plainclothes police raided a student dormitory following a demonstration, triggering days of mass protests. In 2009, security forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds when clamping down on nationwide protests known as the Green Movement. A decade later, when protesters in 2019 decried economic hardship, security forces killed hundreds over the course of a few days.</p><p>Khamenei lived his life arguing that the U.S. couldn't be trusted. He died, his supporters say, vindicated in that belief.</p></body></html>\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{},"source_url":"https://api.refinitiv.com/data/news/v1/stories/urn:newsml:reuters.com:20260301:nS8N3Z400B:1","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"2616842113","content_text":"Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday, the country's state television network confirmed.The government announced a traditional 40 days of national mourning for Khamenei, who was 86 years old. Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Khamenei's death \"would serve as the starting point for a great uprising against the tyrants of the world.\"The undisputed leader of post-revolutionary Iran and spiritual leader of millions of Shiite Muslims, Khamenei developed the nation's nuclear program and built a once-powerful network of regional militant groups that Israel has been systematically dismantling for more than a year. His resistance to the U.S. and Israel resonated widely in the Middle East, even as it gradually fell out of step with large parts of Iran's population, many of whom despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance and wanted to escape the country's global isolation.After taking power in 1989, despite domestic and foreign pressure, Khamenei built Iran into a formidable military and political power. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had left the nation bankrupt and humiliated, following an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, one of the deadliest global conflicts of the past century.\"When Khomeini died, the Islamic Republic was a dumpster fire,\" said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. \"Khamenei, through guile and persistence, was able to achieve something pretty miraculous. He turned Iran into a regional power that controlled a pretty wide geography.\"An instrument for Khamenei's expansion was a network of armed groups in the Middle East that fought at Iran's behest, pinning down foes and providing Tehran with strategic space to prevent direct enemy attacks. At the height of Iran's expansion, it controlled a land corridor running from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, through which it could transport arms and personnel.Khamenei's fortunes changed with what first appeared to be a victory: the attack led by Hamas, its Palestinian ally, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The deadliest single assault ever on Israel, it was heralded by Tehran as a testament to the strength of the alliance it had built from scratch, and brandished Khamenei's self-styled status as a flag bearer for the Palestinian people.But the war Israel unleashed in response, in Gaza and beyond, set in motion a cascade of events that would diminish Iran's regional power and leave Khamenei exposed. The decapitation of close Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, and a series of Israeli strikes on Iran that killed some of its highest-ranking commanders, upended the entire Middle East.At the time of his death, Khamenei no longer drove an expansion of Iranian power, but was working hard to salvage the pieces of the Islamic Republic.His death leaves Iran at a precipice. Khamenei was the linchpin that held together hard-liners and more moderate elements of the Islamic Republic. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn't.So critical was Iran's Supreme Leader to the nation's security that his health was considered a state secret, though state media said he had prostate surgery in 2014. Now Iran's leaders will have to navigate a transition of power, while confronting domestic discontent, economic hardship and external pressure for change from the U.S. and others.Without him, Iranians are left in uncertainty. Khamenei's rule partly depended on being a guarantor of national security. Before Israel's military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries.Iran kept hostile forces away from its soil for decades after the 1980-1988 war with Iraq -- which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including from chemical weapons deployed by Saddam Hussein. From the mid-2010s, while Islamic State killed tens of thousands in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the extremist group also carried out four major attacks in Iran, killing roughly 150 people -- fewer than it killed over the same period in France.Iran's nuclear program brought Khamenei into conflict with Israel and the West. He reactivated the program in the 1990s, after it had been initiated by the Shah in the 1950s. The construction of atomic plants had stalled during the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq.While the Supreme Leader repeatedly insisted the program was peaceful and issued a religious pronouncement asserting Iran wouldn't acquire nuclear arms, Western officials believe Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons until at least 2003. The fast pace of the program's development worried Western powers who imposed increasingly stringent trade restrictions.While Khamenei expanded Iran's clout, economically he fared worse. International sanctions and government mismanagement prevented Iran from fully capitalizing on its immense natural resources. Its regional ambitions were a drain on its already stretched finances. Iran was often prevented from selling oil, its main export, and the wealth from what it did sell disproportionately enriched a small elite.Iran under Khamenei did register progress in some important areas. It boasts some of the best healthcare and education in the region. Life expectancy increased to 77 years in 2023 from 62 in 1986, according to the World Bank. In the same period, Iran boosted female literacy rates to 81% from 41%. But millions of Iranians continue to live in poverty and lack jobs.Neither a full-blown dictatorship nor a democracy, Iran's cleric-ruled system contains elements of both. Khamenei knew how to strike a balance to ensure his political survival. Allowing moderate forces a space in elections gave Khamenei a veneer of legitimacy, while political restrictions ensured that he never lost control.\"If he let democracy loose, he'd be removed,\" said Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, associate professor at Texas A&M University. \"On the other hand, if he put an end to these things [such as elections], there could be a public revolt.\"However, in recent presidential elections, the establishment sidelined scores of moderate and reformist candidates from running for the presidency, helping smooth a path to victory for candidates loyal to Khamenei. His growing reliance on hard-liners in the system put the Islamic Republic on an increasingly confrontational course with its enemies.Khamenei held a pope-like position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God. His black turban, clerical robes and graying beard composed the picture that adorned offices, walls and billboards across the country.To millions of Iranians, he maintained that authority until his death. Khamenei sought to guide the world's Muslims, not just Shiites, and said Iran wanted to usher in an Islamic revival that would sweep the region, \"like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze.\"For many people in the Middle East, Khamenei's touch didn't feel like a breeze. His strong-armed governance confined tens of thousands of critics to prison and drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians into exile.His legacy will also be tainted by his stern support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during that country's civil war that broke out in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. For over a decade, Iran sent Revolutionary Guard forces to Syria and mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished militia fighters from neighboring countries to bolster Assad's war effort that centered on starving and bombing cities into submission.Khamenei's virulent anti-Americanism came to the fore during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he ordered Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fund and train local militias. The armed groups, part of Iran's expanded footprint in the region, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, in addition to thousands of Iraqis.\"The presence of foreign troops is damaging for the Iraqis,\" Khamenei said in 2005. \"The U.S. and Britain will eventually have to leave Iraq with a bitter experience.\"Through propping up predominantly Shiite groups, Khamenei did more to sow sectarian strife among Muslims than to unite them, his critics say, and he damaged Shiite Islam in the process. As public unrest became more frequent during his rule, so did chants from protesters of \"Death to Khamenei\" or calls to stop funding Iran's allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.\"After Khamenei's regime, Iran is far more secular and critical of Shiism than when he came to power,\" said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.Despite his fundamentalist beliefs, Khamenei was a nimble politician. He survived waves of social change in Iran and multiple American administrations bent on undermining his rule.He surrounded himself with advisers and military commanders who kept Iran largely safe from foreign threats. He was an early advocate of Iran's development of ballistic missiles, describing them as a weapon that could threaten Israel and counter the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.A pragmatist as well as an ideologue, Khamenei endorsed diplomacy when convenient. He advocated for dialogue with the U.S. in Iraq and blessed an international nuclear deal in 2015, which granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program. He did so reluctantly.\"Negotiations are meaningful when the other side shows its goodwill,\" he said in 2008, addressing Washington. \"You want to point a gun at the Iranian people and say, 'Negotiate, or I'll fire.'...You should know that the Iranian people will not be frightened as a result of such acts.\"He reluctantly allowed the Iranian government to pursue nuclear negotiations with the West that would lift sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its enrichment activities. After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.\"I have been saying that the Americans cannot be trusted,\" he said in 2018. \"With its calm appearance and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes.\"In recent years, Khamenei also oversaw deepening ties with China and, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot toward the Kremlin. During the war in Ukraine, Iran became one of Russia's most steadfast supporters, voting against U.N. resolutions condemning Moscow and supplying it with weapons, particularly armed drones.Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a Shiite religious scholar. His official biography says he grew up poor in a small house with \"one room and a gloomy basement.\"Khamenei left Mashhad in 1957 to attend seminary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. A year later, he returned to Iran to study in Qom, another important center of Shiite learning.Though first and foremost a seminarian, Khamenei read widely and kept varied company. He met with secular Iranian intellectuals, with whom he shared an antipathy toward the U.S. and its support for the despotic shah of Iran. He was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni Egyptian theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood who propagated the idea of an Islamic Republic. Khamenei even translated several of Qutb's works into Persian.He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings. He praised John Steinbeck's \"The Grapes of Wrath\" for its descriptions of capitalist exploitation and Harriet Beecher Stowe's \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\" for the light it shed on slavery in the U.S. Above all, he admired Victor Hugo whose \"Les Misérables\" Khamenei called \"a miracle in the world of novel writing.\"In Qom, he studied under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose ideas would lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than a year after the revolution, the new clerical-led government dealt with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Khamenei was initially opposed to the seizure of 52 American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days, the late Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once said. Yet, in public, he defended it as necessary for cutting all ties with America.The seizure of the U.S. Embassy, a proclaimed \"den of espionage,\" became a tool for the revolutionaries to solidify their new anti-imperialist rule. It became a model they would follow in the coming decades of rallying public support during times of crises, and it set the tone for decades of hostile relations with Washington.\"The American hostage crisis set the direction. There was no real American threat in 1980 of a coup. This was a pure engineered crisis,\" said Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. \"It created a cleavage with the United States that was really necessary.\"Khamenei was elected president in 1981, during the tumultuous first years of the Islamic Republic. He held the position for eight years through the bloody war with Iraq, during a time when leftist opponents also staged a series of attacks against the Islamic Republic. Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, when explosives hidden in a tape recorder injured him and deprived him for life of the use of his right arm.When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was considered theologically underqualified. But with a nudge from Rafsanjani, the kingmaker, he was picked by the Assembly of Experts as the new leader.Lacking Ayatollah Khomeini's gravitas, Khamenei built his power by balancing Iran's various pillars of authority. External factors helped. High oil prices funded his authoritarian rule. The threat of military action from the U.S. reinforced his message that American administrations worked to overturn the Iranian system -- whether through regional wars, economic sanctions or support for domestic Iranian protest movements.\"An all-encompassing American plan has been arranged to collapse the Islamic Republic system,\" Khamenei told a group of Iranian government officials in 2000, according to the Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji.In the 1990s and 2000s, Khamenei allowed for reformist governments to run for elections, and win, but he dealt harshly with dissidents. In 1999, plainclothes police raided a student dormitory following a demonstration, triggering days of mass protests. In 2009, security forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds when clamping down on nationwide protests known as the Green Movement. A decade later, when protesters in 2019 decried economic hardship, security forces killed hundreds over the course of a few days.Khamenei lived his life arguing that the U.S. couldn't be trusted. He died, his supporters say, vindicated in that belief.","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"PLmain":2,"YMmain":2,"CLmain":2,"PAmain":2,"ESmain":2,"BZmain":2,"NQmain":2,"GCmain":2}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":7,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"hots":[{"id":537882107396200,"gmtCreate":1772330658755,"gmtModify":1772331658605,"author":{"id":"4220467189436712","authorId":"4220467189436712","name":"Parzival1","avatar":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":11,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"authorIdStr":"4220467189436712","idStr":"4220467189436712"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"Buy oil","listText":"Buy oil","text":"Buy oil","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/537882107396200","repostId":"2616842113","repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2616842113","kind":"live","weMediaInfo":{"introduction":"Dow Jones publishes the world’s most trusted business news and financial information in a variety of media.","home_visible":0,"media_name":"Dow Jones","id":"106","head_image":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/150f88aa4d182df19190059f4a365e99"},"pubTimestamp":1772328644,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2616842113?lang=en_US&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2026-03-01 09:30","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Iran State Television Confirms That Khamenei Is Dead","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2616842113","media":"Dow Jones","summary":"Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday, the country's state television ne","content":"<html><head></head><body><p>Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday, the country's state television network confirmed.</p><p>The government announced a traditional 40 days of national mourning for Khamenei, who was 86 years old. Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Khamenei's death "would serve as the starting point for a great uprising against the tyrants of the world."</p><p>The undisputed leader of post-revolutionary Iran and spiritual leader of millions of Shiite Muslims, Khamenei developed the nation's nuclear program and built a once-powerful network of regional militant groups that Israel has been systematically dismantling for more than a year. His resistance to the U.S. and Israel resonated widely in the Middle East, even as it gradually fell out of step with large parts of Iran's population, many of whom despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance and wanted to escape the country's global isolation.</p><p>After taking power in 1989, despite domestic and foreign pressure, Khamenei built Iran into a formidable military and political power. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had left the nation bankrupt and humiliated, following an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, one of the deadliest global conflicts of the past century.</p><p>"When Khomeini died, the Islamic Republic was a dumpster fire," said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "Khamenei, through guile and persistence, was able to achieve something pretty miraculous. He turned Iran into a regional power that controlled a pretty wide geography."</p><p>An instrument for Khamenei's expansion was a network of armed groups in the Middle East that fought at Iran's behest, pinning down foes and providing Tehran with strategic space to prevent direct enemy attacks. At the height of Iran's expansion, it controlled a land corridor running from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, through which it could transport arms and personnel.</p><p>Khamenei's fortunes changed with what first appeared to be a victory: the attack led by Hamas, its Palestinian ally, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The deadliest single assault ever on Israel, it was heralded by Tehran as a testament to the strength of the alliance it had built from scratch, and brandished Khamenei's self-styled status as a flag bearer for the Palestinian people.</p><p>But the war Israel unleashed in response, in Gaza and beyond, set in motion a cascade of events that would diminish Iran's regional power and leave Khamenei exposed. The decapitation of close Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, and a series of Israeli strikes on Iran that killed some of its highest-ranking commanders, upended the entire Middle East.</p><p>At the time of his death, Khamenei no longer drove an expansion of Iranian power, but was working hard to salvage the pieces of the Islamic Republic.</p><p>His death leaves Iran at a precipice. Khamenei was the linchpin that held together hard-liners and more moderate elements of the Islamic Republic. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn't.</p><p>So critical was Iran's Supreme Leader to the nation's security that his health was considered a state secret, though state media said he had prostate surgery in 2014. Now Iran's leaders will have to navigate a transition of power, while confronting domestic discontent, economic hardship and external pressure for change from the U.S. and others.</p><p>Without him, Iranians are left in uncertainty. Khamenei's rule partly depended on being a guarantor of national security. Before Israel's military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries.</p><p>Iran kept hostile forces away from its soil for decades after the 1980-1988 war with Iraq -- which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including from chemical weapons deployed by Saddam Hussein. From the mid-2010s, while Islamic State killed tens of thousands in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the extremist group also carried out four major attacks in Iran, killing roughly 150 people -- fewer than it killed over the same period in France.</p><p>Iran's nuclear program brought Khamenei into conflict with Israel and the West. He reactivated the program in the 1990s, after it had been initiated by the Shah in the 1950s. The construction of atomic plants had stalled during the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq.</p><p>While the Supreme Leader repeatedly insisted the program was peaceful and issued a religious pronouncement asserting Iran wouldn't acquire nuclear arms, Western officials believe Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons until at least 2003. The fast pace of the program's development worried Western powers who imposed increasingly stringent trade restrictions.</p><p>While Khamenei expanded Iran's clout, economically he fared worse. International sanctions and government mismanagement prevented Iran from fully capitalizing on its immense natural resources. Its regional ambitions were a drain on its already stretched finances. Iran was often prevented from selling oil, its main export, and the wealth from what it did sell disproportionately enriched a small elite.</p><p>Iran under Khamenei did register progress in some important areas. It boasts some of the best healthcare and education in the region. Life expectancy increased to 77 years in 2023 from 62 in 1986, according to the World Bank. In the same period, Iran boosted female literacy rates to 81% from 41%. But millions of Iranians continue to live in poverty and lack jobs.</p><p>Neither a full-blown dictatorship nor a democracy, Iran's cleric-ruled system contains elements of both. Khamenei knew how to strike a balance to ensure his political survival. Allowing moderate forces a space in elections gave Khamenei a veneer of legitimacy, while political restrictions ensured that he never lost control.</p><p>"If he let democracy loose, he'd be removed," said Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, associate professor at Texas A&M University. "On the other hand, if he put an end to these things [such as elections], there could be a public revolt."</p><p>However, in recent presidential elections, the establishment sidelined scores of moderate and reformist candidates from running for the presidency, helping smooth a path to victory for candidates loyal to Khamenei. His growing reliance on hard-liners in the system put the Islamic Republic on an increasingly confrontational course with its enemies.</p><p>Khamenei held a pope-like position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God. His black turban, clerical robes and graying beard composed the picture that adorned offices, walls and billboards across the country.</p><p>To millions of Iranians, he maintained that authority until his death. Khamenei sought to guide the world's Muslims, not just Shiites, and said Iran wanted to usher in an Islamic revival that would sweep the region, "like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze."</p><p>For many people in the Middle East, Khamenei's touch didn't feel like a breeze. His strong-armed governance confined tens of thousands of critics to prison and drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians into exile.</p><p>His legacy will also be tainted by his stern support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during that country's civil war that broke out in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. For over a decade, Iran sent Revolutionary Guard forces to Syria and mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished militia fighters from neighboring countries to bolster Assad's war effort that centered on starving and bombing cities into submission.</p><p>Khamenei's virulent anti-Americanism came to the fore during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he ordered Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fund and train local militias. The armed groups, part of Iran's expanded footprint in the region, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, in addition to thousands of Iraqis.</p><p>"The presence of foreign troops is damaging for the Iraqis," Khamenei said in 2005. "The U.S. and Britain will eventually have to leave Iraq with a bitter experience."</p><p>Through propping up predominantly Shiite groups, Khamenei did more to sow sectarian strife among Muslims than to unite them, his critics say, and he damaged Shiite Islam in the process. As public unrest became more frequent during his rule, so did chants from protesters of "Death to Khamenei" or calls to stop funding Iran's allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.</p><p>"After Khamenei's regime, Iran is far more secular and critical of Shiism than when he came to power," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.</p><p>Despite his fundamentalist beliefs, Khamenei was a nimble politician. He survived waves of social change in Iran and multiple American administrations bent on undermining his rule.</p><p>He surrounded himself with advisers and military commanders who kept Iran largely safe from foreign threats. He was an early advocate of Iran's development of ballistic missiles, describing them as a weapon that could threaten Israel and counter the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.</p><p>A pragmatist as well as an ideologue, Khamenei endorsed diplomacy when convenient. He advocated for dialogue with the U.S. in Iraq and blessed an international nuclear deal in 2015, which granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program. He did so reluctantly.</p><p>"Negotiations are meaningful when the other side shows its goodwill," he said in 2008, addressing Washington. "You want to point a gun at the Iranian people and say, 'Negotiate, or I'll fire.'...You should know that the Iranian people will not be frightened as a result of such acts."</p><p>He reluctantly allowed the Iranian government to pursue nuclear negotiations with the West that would lift sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its enrichment activities. After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.</p><p>"I have been saying that the Americans cannot be trusted," he said in 2018. "With its calm appearance and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes."</p><p>In recent years, Khamenei also oversaw deepening ties with China and, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot toward the Kremlin. During the war in Ukraine, Iran became one of Russia's most steadfast supporters, voting against U.N. resolutions condemning Moscow and supplying it with weapons, particularly armed drones.</p><p>Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a Shiite religious scholar. His official biography says he grew up poor in a small house with "one room and a gloomy basement."</p><p>Khamenei left Mashhad in 1957 to attend seminary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. A year later, he returned to Iran to study in Qom, another important center of Shiite learning.</p><p>Though first and foremost a seminarian, Khamenei read widely and kept varied company. He met with secular Iranian intellectuals, with whom he shared an antipathy toward the U.S. and its support for the despotic shah of Iran. He was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni Egyptian theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood who propagated the idea of an Islamic Republic. Khamenei even translated several of Qutb's works into Persian.</p><p>He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings. He praised John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" for its descriptions of capitalist exploitation and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for the light it shed on slavery in the U.S. Above all, he admired Victor Hugo whose "Les Misérables" Khamenei called "a miracle in the world of novel writing."</p><p>In Qom, he studied under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose ideas would lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than a year after the revolution, the new clerical-led government dealt with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Khamenei was initially opposed to the seizure of 52 American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days, the late Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once said. Yet, in public, he defended it as necessary for cutting all ties with America.</p><p>The seizure of the U.S. Embassy, a proclaimed "den of espionage," became a tool for the revolutionaries to solidify their new anti-imperialist rule. It became a model they would follow in the coming decades of rallying public support during times of crises, and it set the tone for decades of hostile relations with Washington.</p><p>"The American hostage crisis set the direction. There was no real American threat in 1980 of a coup. This was a pure engineered crisis," said Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. "It created a cleavage with the United States that was really necessary."</p><p>Khamenei was elected president in 1981, during the tumultuous first years of the Islamic Republic. He held the position for eight years through the bloody war with Iraq, during a time when leftist opponents also staged a series of attacks against the Islamic Republic. Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, when explosives hidden in a tape recorder injured him and deprived him for life of the use of his right arm.</p><p>When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was considered theologically underqualified. But with a nudge from Rafsanjani, the kingmaker, he was picked by the Assembly of Experts as the new leader.</p><p>Lacking Ayatollah Khomeini's gravitas, Khamenei built his power by balancing Iran's various pillars of authority. External factors helped. High oil prices funded his authoritarian rule. The threat of military action from the U.S. reinforced his message that American administrations worked to overturn the Iranian system -- whether through regional wars, economic sanctions or support for domestic Iranian protest movements.</p><p>"An all-encompassing American plan has been arranged to collapse the Islamic Republic system," Khamenei told a group of Iranian government officials in 2000, according to the Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji.</p><p>In the 1990s and 2000s, Khamenei allowed for reformist governments to run for elections, and win, but he dealt harshly with dissidents. In 1999, plainclothes police raided a student dormitory following a demonstration, triggering days of mass protests. In 2009, security forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds when clamping down on nationwide protests known as the Green Movement. A decade later, when protesters in 2019 decried economic hardship, security forces killed hundreds over the course of a few days.</p><p>Khamenei lived his life arguing that the U.S. couldn't be trusted. He died, his supporters say, vindicated in that belief.</p></body></html>","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Iran State Television Confirms That Khamenei Is Dead</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nIran State Television Confirms That Khamenei Is Dead\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n<div class=\"head\" \">\n\n\n<div class=\"h-thumb\" style=\"background-image:url(https://static.tigerbbs.com/150f88aa4d182df19190059f4a365e99);background-size:cover;\"></div>\n\n<div class=\"h-content\">\n<p class=\"h-name\">Dow Jones </p>\n<p class=\"h-time\">2026-03-01 09:30</p>\n</div>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<html><head></head><body><p>Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday, the country's state television network confirmed.</p><p>The government announced a traditional 40 days of national mourning for Khamenei, who was 86 years old. Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Khamenei's death "would serve as the starting point for a great uprising against the tyrants of the world."</p><p>The undisputed leader of post-revolutionary Iran and spiritual leader of millions of Shiite Muslims, Khamenei developed the nation's nuclear program and built a once-powerful network of regional militant groups that Israel has been systematically dismantling for more than a year. His resistance to the U.S. and Israel resonated widely in the Middle East, even as it gradually fell out of step with large parts of Iran's population, many of whom despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance and wanted to escape the country's global isolation.</p><p>After taking power in 1989, despite domestic and foreign pressure, Khamenei built Iran into a formidable military and political power. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had left the nation bankrupt and humiliated, following an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, one of the deadliest global conflicts of the past century.</p><p>"When Khomeini died, the Islamic Republic was a dumpster fire," said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "Khamenei, through guile and persistence, was able to achieve something pretty miraculous. He turned Iran into a regional power that controlled a pretty wide geography."</p><p>An instrument for Khamenei's expansion was a network of armed groups in the Middle East that fought at Iran's behest, pinning down foes and providing Tehran with strategic space to prevent direct enemy attacks. At the height of Iran's expansion, it controlled a land corridor running from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, through which it could transport arms and personnel.</p><p>Khamenei's fortunes changed with what first appeared to be a victory: the attack led by Hamas, its Palestinian ally, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The deadliest single assault ever on Israel, it was heralded by Tehran as a testament to the strength of the alliance it had built from scratch, and brandished Khamenei's self-styled status as a flag bearer for the Palestinian people.</p><p>But the war Israel unleashed in response, in Gaza and beyond, set in motion a cascade of events that would diminish Iran's regional power and leave Khamenei exposed. The decapitation of close Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, and a series of Israeli strikes on Iran that killed some of its highest-ranking commanders, upended the entire Middle East.</p><p>At the time of his death, Khamenei no longer drove an expansion of Iranian power, but was working hard to salvage the pieces of the Islamic Republic.</p><p>His death leaves Iran at a precipice. Khamenei was the linchpin that held together hard-liners and more moderate elements of the Islamic Republic. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn't.</p><p>So critical was Iran's Supreme Leader to the nation's security that his health was considered a state secret, though state media said he had prostate surgery in 2014. Now Iran's leaders will have to navigate a transition of power, while confronting domestic discontent, economic hardship and external pressure for change from the U.S. and others.</p><p>Without him, Iranians are left in uncertainty. Khamenei's rule partly depended on being a guarantor of national security. Before Israel's military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries.</p><p>Iran kept hostile forces away from its soil for decades after the 1980-1988 war with Iraq -- which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including from chemical weapons deployed by Saddam Hussein. From the mid-2010s, while Islamic State killed tens of thousands in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the extremist group also carried out four major attacks in Iran, killing roughly 150 people -- fewer than it killed over the same period in France.</p><p>Iran's nuclear program brought Khamenei into conflict with Israel and the West. He reactivated the program in the 1990s, after it had been initiated by the Shah in the 1950s. The construction of atomic plants had stalled during the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq.</p><p>While the Supreme Leader repeatedly insisted the program was peaceful and issued a religious pronouncement asserting Iran wouldn't acquire nuclear arms, Western officials believe Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons until at least 2003. The fast pace of the program's development worried Western powers who imposed increasingly stringent trade restrictions.</p><p>While Khamenei expanded Iran's clout, economically he fared worse. International sanctions and government mismanagement prevented Iran from fully capitalizing on its immense natural resources. Its regional ambitions were a drain on its already stretched finances. Iran was often prevented from selling oil, its main export, and the wealth from what it did sell disproportionately enriched a small elite.</p><p>Iran under Khamenei did register progress in some important areas. It boasts some of the best healthcare and education in the region. Life expectancy increased to 77 years in 2023 from 62 in 1986, according to the World Bank. In the same period, Iran boosted female literacy rates to 81% from 41%. But millions of Iranians continue to live in poverty and lack jobs.</p><p>Neither a full-blown dictatorship nor a democracy, Iran's cleric-ruled system contains elements of both. Khamenei knew how to strike a balance to ensure his political survival. Allowing moderate forces a space in elections gave Khamenei a veneer of legitimacy, while political restrictions ensured that he never lost control.</p><p>"If he let democracy loose, he'd be removed," said Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, associate professor at Texas A&M University. "On the other hand, if he put an end to these things [such as elections], there could be a public revolt."</p><p>However, in recent presidential elections, the establishment sidelined scores of moderate and reformist candidates from running for the presidency, helping smooth a path to victory for candidates loyal to Khamenei. His growing reliance on hard-liners in the system put the Islamic Republic on an increasingly confrontational course with its enemies.</p><p>Khamenei held a pope-like position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God. His black turban, clerical robes and graying beard composed the picture that adorned offices, walls and billboards across the country.</p><p>To millions of Iranians, he maintained that authority until his death. Khamenei sought to guide the world's Muslims, not just Shiites, and said Iran wanted to usher in an Islamic revival that would sweep the region, "like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze."</p><p>For many people in the Middle East, Khamenei's touch didn't feel like a breeze. His strong-armed governance confined tens of thousands of critics to prison and drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians into exile.</p><p>His legacy will also be tainted by his stern support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during that country's civil war that broke out in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. For over a decade, Iran sent Revolutionary Guard forces to Syria and mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished militia fighters from neighboring countries to bolster Assad's war effort that centered on starving and bombing cities into submission.</p><p>Khamenei's virulent anti-Americanism came to the fore during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he ordered Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fund and train local militias. The armed groups, part of Iran's expanded footprint in the region, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, in addition to thousands of Iraqis.</p><p>"The presence of foreign troops is damaging for the Iraqis," Khamenei said in 2005. "The U.S. and Britain will eventually have to leave Iraq with a bitter experience."</p><p>Through propping up predominantly Shiite groups, Khamenei did more to sow sectarian strife among Muslims than to unite them, his critics say, and he damaged Shiite Islam in the process. As public unrest became more frequent during his rule, so did chants from protesters of "Death to Khamenei" or calls to stop funding Iran's allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.</p><p>"After Khamenei's regime, Iran is far more secular and critical of Shiism than when he came to power," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.</p><p>Despite his fundamentalist beliefs, Khamenei was a nimble politician. He survived waves of social change in Iran and multiple American administrations bent on undermining his rule.</p><p>He surrounded himself with advisers and military commanders who kept Iran largely safe from foreign threats. He was an early advocate of Iran's development of ballistic missiles, describing them as a weapon that could threaten Israel and counter the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.</p><p>A pragmatist as well as an ideologue, Khamenei endorsed diplomacy when convenient. He advocated for dialogue with the U.S. in Iraq and blessed an international nuclear deal in 2015, which granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program. He did so reluctantly.</p><p>"Negotiations are meaningful when the other side shows its goodwill," he said in 2008, addressing Washington. "You want to point a gun at the Iranian people and say, 'Negotiate, or I'll fire.'...You should know that the Iranian people will not be frightened as a result of such acts."</p><p>He reluctantly allowed the Iranian government to pursue nuclear negotiations with the West that would lift sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its enrichment activities. After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.</p><p>"I have been saying that the Americans cannot be trusted," he said in 2018. "With its calm appearance and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes."</p><p>In recent years, Khamenei also oversaw deepening ties with China and, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot toward the Kremlin. During the war in Ukraine, Iran became one of Russia's most steadfast supporters, voting against U.N. resolutions condemning Moscow and supplying it with weapons, particularly armed drones.</p><p>Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a Shiite religious scholar. His official biography says he grew up poor in a small house with "one room and a gloomy basement."</p><p>Khamenei left Mashhad in 1957 to attend seminary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. A year later, he returned to Iran to study in Qom, another important center of Shiite learning.</p><p>Though first and foremost a seminarian, Khamenei read widely and kept varied company. He met with secular Iranian intellectuals, with whom he shared an antipathy toward the U.S. and its support for the despotic shah of Iran. He was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni Egyptian theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood who propagated the idea of an Islamic Republic. Khamenei even translated several of Qutb's works into Persian.</p><p>He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings. He praised John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" for its descriptions of capitalist exploitation and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for the light it shed on slavery in the U.S. Above all, he admired Victor Hugo whose "Les Misérables" Khamenei called "a miracle in the world of novel writing."</p><p>In Qom, he studied under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose ideas would lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than a year after the revolution, the new clerical-led government dealt with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Khamenei was initially opposed to the seizure of 52 American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days, the late Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once said. Yet, in public, he defended it as necessary for cutting all ties with America.</p><p>The seizure of the U.S. Embassy, a proclaimed "den of espionage," became a tool for the revolutionaries to solidify their new anti-imperialist rule. It became a model they would follow in the coming decades of rallying public support during times of crises, and it set the tone for decades of hostile relations with Washington.</p><p>"The American hostage crisis set the direction. There was no real American threat in 1980 of a coup. This was a pure engineered crisis," said Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. "It created a cleavage with the United States that was really necessary."</p><p>Khamenei was elected president in 1981, during the tumultuous first years of the Islamic Republic. He held the position for eight years through the bloody war with Iraq, during a time when leftist opponents also staged a series of attacks against the Islamic Republic. Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, when explosives hidden in a tape recorder injured him and deprived him for life of the use of his right arm.</p><p>When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was considered theologically underqualified. But with a nudge from Rafsanjani, the kingmaker, he was picked by the Assembly of Experts as the new leader.</p><p>Lacking Ayatollah Khomeini's gravitas, Khamenei built his power by balancing Iran's various pillars of authority. External factors helped. High oil prices funded his authoritarian rule. The threat of military action from the U.S. reinforced his message that American administrations worked to overturn the Iranian system -- whether through regional wars, economic sanctions or support for domestic Iranian protest movements.</p><p>"An all-encompassing American plan has been arranged to collapse the Islamic Republic system," Khamenei told a group of Iranian government officials in 2000, according to the Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji.</p><p>In the 1990s and 2000s, Khamenei allowed for reformist governments to run for elections, and win, but he dealt harshly with dissidents. In 1999, plainclothes police raided a student dormitory following a demonstration, triggering days of mass protests. In 2009, security forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds when clamping down on nationwide protests known as the Green Movement. A decade later, when protesters in 2019 decried economic hardship, security forces killed hundreds over the course of a few days.</p><p>Khamenei lived his life arguing that the U.S. couldn't be trusted. He died, his supporters say, vindicated in that belief.</p></body></html>\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{},"source_url":"https://api.refinitiv.com/data/news/v1/stories/urn:newsml:reuters.com:20260301:nS8N3Z400B:1","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"2616842113","content_text":"Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday, the country's state television network confirmed.The government announced a traditional 40 days of national mourning for Khamenei, who was 86 years old. Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Khamenei's death \"would serve as the starting point for a great uprising against the tyrants of the world.\"The undisputed leader of post-revolutionary Iran and spiritual leader of millions of Shiite Muslims, Khamenei developed the nation's nuclear program and built a once-powerful network of regional militant groups that Israel has been systematically dismantling for more than a year. His resistance to the U.S. and Israel resonated widely in the Middle East, even as it gradually fell out of step with large parts of Iran's population, many of whom despised living under his firebrand form of theocratic governance and wanted to escape the country's global isolation.After taking power in 1989, despite domestic and foreign pressure, Khamenei built Iran into a formidable military and political power. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had left the nation bankrupt and humiliated, following an eight-year war with neighboring Iraq, one of the deadliest global conflicts of the past century.\"When Khomeini died, the Islamic Republic was a dumpster fire,\" said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. \"Khamenei, through guile and persistence, was able to achieve something pretty miraculous. He turned Iran into a regional power that controlled a pretty wide geography.\"An instrument for Khamenei's expansion was a network of armed groups in the Middle East that fought at Iran's behest, pinning down foes and providing Tehran with strategic space to prevent direct enemy attacks. At the height of Iran's expansion, it controlled a land corridor running from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, through which it could transport arms and personnel.Khamenei's fortunes changed with what first appeared to be a victory: the attack led by Hamas, its Palestinian ally, on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The deadliest single assault ever on Israel, it was heralded by Tehran as a testament to the strength of the alliance it had built from scratch, and brandished Khamenei's self-styled status as a flag bearer for the Palestinian people.But the war Israel unleashed in response, in Gaza and beyond, set in motion a cascade of events that would diminish Iran's regional power and leave Khamenei exposed. The decapitation of close Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, and a series of Israeli strikes on Iran that killed some of its highest-ranking commanders, upended the entire Middle East.At the time of his death, Khamenei no longer drove an expansion of Iranian power, but was working hard to salvage the pieces of the Islamic Republic.His death leaves Iran at a precipice. Khamenei was the linchpin that held together hard-liners and more moderate elements of the Islamic Republic. He secured his rule at home by building fierce loyalty among those who supported him, and a pervasive surveillance state to suppress those who didn't.So critical was Iran's Supreme Leader to the nation's security that his health was considered a state secret, though state media said he had prostate surgery in 2014. Now Iran's leaders will have to navigate a transition of power, while confronting domestic discontent, economic hardship and external pressure for change from the U.S. and others.Without him, Iranians are left in uncertainty. Khamenei's rule partly depended on being a guarantor of national security. Before Israel's military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries.Iran kept hostile forces away from its soil for decades after the 1980-1988 war with Iraq -- which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including from chemical weapons deployed by Saddam Hussein. From the mid-2010s, while Islamic State killed tens of thousands in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the extremist group also carried out four major attacks in Iran, killing roughly 150 people -- fewer than it killed over the same period in France.Iran's nuclear program brought Khamenei into conflict with Israel and the West. He reactivated the program in the 1990s, after it had been initiated by the Shah in the 1950s. The construction of atomic plants had stalled during the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq.While the Supreme Leader repeatedly insisted the program was peaceful and issued a religious pronouncement asserting Iran wouldn't acquire nuclear arms, Western officials believe Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons until at least 2003. The fast pace of the program's development worried Western powers who imposed increasingly stringent trade restrictions.While Khamenei expanded Iran's clout, economically he fared worse. International sanctions and government mismanagement prevented Iran from fully capitalizing on its immense natural resources. Its regional ambitions were a drain on its already stretched finances. Iran was often prevented from selling oil, its main export, and the wealth from what it did sell disproportionately enriched a small elite.Iran under Khamenei did register progress in some important areas. It boasts some of the best healthcare and education in the region. Life expectancy increased to 77 years in 2023 from 62 in 1986, according to the World Bank. In the same period, Iran boosted female literacy rates to 81% from 41%. But millions of Iranians continue to live in poverty and lack jobs.Neither a full-blown dictatorship nor a democracy, Iran's cleric-ruled system contains elements of both. Khamenei knew how to strike a balance to ensure his political survival. Allowing moderate forces a space in elections gave Khamenei a veneer of legitimacy, while political restrictions ensured that he never lost control.\"If he let democracy loose, he'd be removed,\" said Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, associate professor at Texas A&M University. \"On the other hand, if he put an end to these things [such as elections], there could be a public revolt.\"However, in recent presidential elections, the establishment sidelined scores of moderate and reformist candidates from running for the presidency, helping smooth a path to victory for candidates loyal to Khamenei. His growing reliance on hard-liners in the system put the Islamic Republic on an increasingly confrontational course with its enemies.Khamenei held a pope-like position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God. His black turban, clerical robes and graying beard composed the picture that adorned offices, walls and billboards across the country.To millions of Iranians, he maintained that authority until his death. Khamenei sought to guide the world's Muslims, not just Shiites, and said Iran wanted to usher in an Islamic revival that would sweep the region, \"like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze.\"For many people in the Middle East, Khamenei's touch didn't feel like a breeze. His strong-armed governance confined tens of thousands of critics to prison and drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians into exile.His legacy will also be tainted by his stern support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during that country's civil war that broke out in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. For over a decade, Iran sent Revolutionary Guard forces to Syria and mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished militia fighters from neighboring countries to bolster Assad's war effort that centered on starving and bombing cities into submission.Khamenei's virulent anti-Americanism came to the fore during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he ordered Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fund and train local militias. The armed groups, part of Iran's expanded footprint in the region, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, in addition to thousands of Iraqis.\"The presence of foreign troops is damaging for the Iraqis,\" Khamenei said in 2005. \"The U.S. and Britain will eventually have to leave Iraq with a bitter experience.\"Through propping up predominantly Shiite groups, Khamenei did more to sow sectarian strife among Muslims than to unite them, his critics say, and he damaged Shiite Islam in the process. As public unrest became more frequent during his rule, so did chants from protesters of \"Death to Khamenei\" or calls to stop funding Iran's allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.\"After Khamenei's regime, Iran is far more secular and critical of Shiism than when he came to power,\" said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.Despite his fundamentalist beliefs, Khamenei was a nimble politician. He survived waves of social change in Iran and multiple American administrations bent on undermining his rule.He surrounded himself with advisers and military commanders who kept Iran largely safe from foreign threats. He was an early advocate of Iran's development of ballistic missiles, describing them as a weapon that could threaten Israel and counter the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.A pragmatist as well as an ideologue, Khamenei endorsed diplomacy when convenient. He advocated for dialogue with the U.S. in Iraq and blessed an international nuclear deal in 2015, which granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program. He did so reluctantly.\"Negotiations are meaningful when the other side shows its goodwill,\" he said in 2008, addressing Washington. \"You want to point a gun at the Iranian people and say, 'Negotiate, or I'll fire.'...You should know that the Iranian people will not be frightened as a result of such acts.\"He reluctantly allowed the Iranian government to pursue nuclear negotiations with the West that would lift sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its enrichment activities. After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.\"I have been saying that the Americans cannot be trusted,\" he said in 2018. \"With its calm appearance and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes.\"In recent years, Khamenei also oversaw deepening ties with China and, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot toward the Kremlin. During the war in Ukraine, Iran became one of Russia's most steadfast supporters, voting against U.N. resolutions condemning Moscow and supplying it with weapons, particularly armed drones.Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on April 19, 1939, in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, the second of eight children of a Shiite religious scholar. His official biography says he grew up poor in a small house with \"one room and a gloomy basement.\"Khamenei left Mashhad in 1957 to attend seminary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. A year later, he returned to Iran to study in Qom, another important center of Shiite learning.Though first and foremost a seminarian, Khamenei read widely and kept varied company. He met with secular Iranian intellectuals, with whom he shared an antipathy toward the U.S. and its support for the despotic shah of Iran. He was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni Egyptian theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood who propagated the idea of an Islamic Republic. Khamenei even translated several of Qutb's works into Persian.He lauded such Russian novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov for what he called their pro-revolutionary writings. He praised John Steinbeck's \"The Grapes of Wrath\" for its descriptions of capitalist exploitation and Harriet Beecher Stowe's \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\" for the light it shed on slavery in the U.S. Above all, he admired Victor Hugo whose \"Les Misérables\" Khamenei called \"a miracle in the world of novel writing.\"In Qom, he studied under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose ideas would lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than a year after the revolution, the new clerical-led government dealt with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Khamenei was initially opposed to the seizure of 52 American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days, the late Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once said. Yet, in public, he defended it as necessary for cutting all ties with America.The seizure of the U.S. Embassy, a proclaimed \"den of espionage,\" became a tool for the revolutionaries to solidify their new anti-imperialist rule. It became a model they would follow in the coming decades of rallying public support during times of crises, and it set the tone for decades of hostile relations with Washington.\"The American hostage crisis set the direction. There was no real American threat in 1980 of a coup. This was a pure engineered crisis,\" said Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. \"It created a cleavage with the United States that was really necessary.\"Khamenei was elected president in 1981, during the tumultuous first years of the Islamic Republic. He held the position for eight years through the bloody war with Iraq, during a time when leftist opponents also staged a series of attacks against the Islamic Republic. Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, when explosives hidden in a tape recorder injured him and deprived him for life of the use of his right arm.When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was considered theologically underqualified. But with a nudge from Rafsanjani, the kingmaker, he was picked by the Assembly of Experts as the new leader.Lacking Ayatollah Khomeini's gravitas, Khamenei built his power by balancing Iran's various pillars of authority. External factors helped. High oil prices funded his authoritarian rule. The threat of military action from the U.S. reinforced his message that American administrations worked to overturn the Iranian system -- whether through regional wars, economic sanctions or support for domestic Iranian protest movements.\"An all-encompassing American plan has been arranged to collapse the Islamic Republic system,\" Khamenei told a group of Iranian government officials in 2000, according to the Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji.In the 1990s and 2000s, Khamenei allowed for reformist governments to run for elections, and win, but he dealt harshly with dissidents. In 1999, plainclothes police raided a student dormitory following a demonstration, triggering days of mass protests. In 2009, security forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds when clamping down on nationwide protests known as the Green Movement. A decade later, when protesters in 2019 decried economic hardship, security forces killed hundreds over the course of a few days.Khamenei lived his life arguing that the U.S. couldn't be trusted. He died, his supporters say, vindicated in that belief.","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"PLmain":2,"YMmain":2,"CLmain":2,"PAmain":2,"ESmain":2,"BZmain":2,"NQmain":2,"GCmain":2}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":7,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"lives":[]}
