Karim Sadjadpour
In June 1989, when Ali Khamenei was elevated to the position of supreme leader of Iran, he let slip the sense of insecurity that would come to define his brutal 37-year reign.
“I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings,” he said in his inaugural address, and “truly a minor seminarian.” It was, at the time, an accurate self-assessment for a mid-ranking cleric in the hierarchical world of Shiite Islam.
Over the next four decades, this seemingly unqualified cleric who rose to the top almost by chance would become one of the world’s longest-serving autocrats, confounding every American president since George H.W. Bush. He would at one point become the most powerful man in the Middle East, dominating five failing lands — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza. This ambition and hubris also eventually led to his downfall. He came to govern with the hypervigilance and brutality of a man driven by the idea that much of his own society and the world’s greatest superpower sought to unseat him — which, in the end, it did. President Trump announced on social media that Ayatollah Khamenei was killed on Saturday. He was 86.
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