Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a major attack by Israel and the United States, multiple news agencies reported, quoting Iranian state media early Sunday. The 86-year-old’s killing has thrown the future of the Islamic Republic into doubt while raising the risk of regional instability.
President Donald Trump announced the death hours earlier, saying it gave Iranians their “greatest chance” to “take back” their country.
Khamenei was killed in an airstrike targeting his compound in downtown Tehran, state media reported. His death at his office “showed that he consistently stood among the people and at the forefront of his responsibilities, confronting what officials call global arrogance,” state TV said.
What next in Iran?
The attack opened a stunning new chapter in US intervention in Iran, carried the potential for retaliatory violence and a wider war, and represented a startling flex of military might for an American president who swept into office on an “America First” platform and vowed to keep out of “forever wars”, news agency AP reported.
Iran, which responded to the strikes with its own counterassault, warned of retribution, with the Cabinet saying that this “great crime will never go unanswered.” The paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened to launch its “most intense offensive operation” ever.
The killing of Khamenei in the second Trump administration’s assault on Iran in eight months appeared certain to create a leadership vacuum, given the absence of a known successor.
Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Iranian revolution that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty.
What will the killing mean for leadership in Iran?
The death adds urgency to one of the most critical questions raised by Trump’s assault, according to a CNN analysis – Would the removal of top leaders unleash a torrent of institutional reform, or set off uncontrollable political forces that would deepen repression and tear the country apart?
“At some point, they will be calling me to ask who I would like (as leader),” Trump told NBC.
Who will succeed Khamenei?
Khamenei’s death might as well be the most existential threat to Iran’s Islamist regime since the 1979 revolution. But it doesn’t necessarily mean a quick end to the theocracy that controls the country, according to politics.
Iran has an elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, yet the real power has rested with its supreme leader. Iran has had only two supreme leaders since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
In 1989, Khamenei was selected by the Assembly of Experts, a council of clerics, as the successor to the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had died at 86.
The supreme leader had final say on all major policies during his decades in power. He led Iran’s clerical establishment and the Revolutionary Guard, the two main centers of power in the governing theocracy.
Khamenei’s death leaves no obvious successor. For years, former President Ebrahim Raisi had been favored to replace Khamenei upon the supreme leader’s death. But he was killed in a 2024 helicopter crash.
Since then, the slain supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been spoken of as one possible successor. He is, however, seen as more of a shadowy figure with behind-the-scenes influence, politics reported. Mojtaba is believed to play an important role in managing his father’s wealth.
Khamenei had reportedly selected three candidates who could take his place during last June’s 12-day war. Their names have not been made public yet.
The uncertainty about succession could create an opportunity for the regime’s opponents, analysts say. In video comments announcing the US strikes in Iran on Saturday, Trump urged Iranian citizens to seize the moment to topple the regime. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” he said. “This will probably be your only chance for generations.”
At home, Khamenei faced challenges too. From a massive 2009 uprising over accusations of election fraud to recent nationwide protests seeking to topple the regime that garnered Trump’s backing in January, before the Iranian government stomped them out.
“A post-Khamenei Iran is not necessarily a post-Islamic Republic of Iran,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, the senior Iran director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, as quoted by Politics.
“The Islamic Republic has been able to survive significant domestic and foreign pressure.”
The joint US-Israel operation, which officials say was planned for months, took place Saturday during Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. It followed stilted negotiations and warnings from Trump, who last year trumpeted his administration’s success in incapacitating the country’s nuclear program but nonetheless cast the latest round as necessary to head off its potential resurgence.
“This is the beginning. I expect more attacks on the Islamic regime’s leadership, its ballistic missile capabilities, nuclear and military industry facilities and security forces (mainly IRGC),” Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, head of the Jerusalem Institute of Strategy and Security (JISS), told LiveMint in an email response.
Reza Pahlavi and the IRGC
Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, released a statement of his own shortly after strikes began. The regime is “collapsing,” Pahlavi said in comments posted to social media, praising Trump for what he described as a “humanitarian intervention.”
“However, despite the arrival of this assistance, the final victory will still be achieved by us,” Pahlavi said. “It is we, the people of Iran, who will finish this task in this final battle. The time to return to the streets is approaching.”
Pahlavi, who lives in the US, has sought to position himself as the primary opposition leader to the Islamist regime. There is no clarity on the degree of support for him among Iranians.
Iran’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, could take the mantle of leadership.
Complete power under hardline IRGC generals would likely mean a persistence of repression in Iran under a military structure — and of a starkly anti-American government that could still wreak havoc in the region, politics said.
In January, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing US Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that in the event of Khamenei’s death, “no one knows who would take over” the reins of power in the country.
“That’s an open question,” Rubio told senators then.
Unsuccessful nuclear talks
Tensions have soared in recent weeks as the Trump administration built up the largest force of American warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades. The president insisted he wanted a deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear program while the country struggled with growing dissent following nationwide protests.
Though Trump had pronounced the Iranian nuclear program obliterated in strikes last year, the country was rebuilding infrastructure that it had lost, according to a senior US official who spoke to AP reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s decision-making process. The official said intelligence showed that Iran had developed the capability to produce its own high-quality centrifuges, an important step in developing the highly enriched uranium needed for weapons.
Trump’s claims that the nuclear program and long-range missiles posed an immediate risk to the United States were overblown and contradict US intelligence assessments, according to the CNN analysis.
“We’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future,” Trump said in a video released from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida early Saturday.
Impact on the Middle East
The death has left the Middle East at risk of broader conflict, with consequences for energy markets, regional alliances, and global diplomacy.
The strikes could rattle global markets, particularly if Iran makes the Strait of Hormuz unsafe for commercial traffic. A third of worldwide oil exports transported by sea passed through the Strait in 2025.
This will probably be your only chance for generations.
Iran faced widespread criticism from several Muslim-majority countries as well as non-governmental and religious organizations after it carried out retaliatory strikes on US and Israeli military bases located in several Muslim neighboring nations on Saturday, following the US-Israel attacks on Tehran.
Saudi Arabia “expressed its strongest condemnation of the blatant and cowardly Iranian attacks targeting the Riyadh and Eastern Province regionswhich were repelled,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) condemned Iran for what it called the ‘targeting of the sovereignty and territories of neighboring member states – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar. The OIC said the attacks had escalated and posed a threat to the region’s stability.
In a statement issued by the World Muslim League’s General Secretariat, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulkarim Al Issa, the league’s secretary general and chairman of the Organization of Muslim Scholarsdenounced the attack, describing it as a blatant act of aggression against religious values.
(With inputs from agencies, CNN and Politico)
