March 19, 2026 - His government brutally put down a popular uprising in December 2025–January 2026 that killed thousands. Ultimately, though, Khamenei will not be remembered by most Iranians as a strong leader.

2 weeks ago - The IRGC was insistent on appointing a permanent leader swiftly. On 3 March, Fars said they were at the "final stages" of choosing a new supreme leader. Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was appointed by the Assembly of Experts on 8 March 2026.

March 1, 2026 - Khamenei brutally crushed those demonstrations, triggering both a backlash and more protest movements over the years. Iran killed thousands of its citizens under Khamenei's rule, including more than 7,000 people killed during weeks of mass protests that started in late December 2025, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based organization that closely tracks rights abuses in Iran. ... Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah ...

March 4, 2026 - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, shaped the modern Middle East more than any other leader over the past four decades, ruling the country with an iron fist and crushing dissent with brutality.

March 2, 2026 - In recent years, he prioritised his survival – and that of his regime – above all else. His government brutally put down a popular uprising in December 2025–January 2026 that killed thousands.

January 11, 2026 - “Unfortunately, if the Ayatollah is taking any lesson from the Shah, it’s that the Shah was weak and caved,” Scott Anderson, the author of “King of Kings,” a history of the revolution published last year, told me. “Brutally speaking, if the Shah had been tougher and had instructed his soldiers to indiscriminately kill people in the streets, he might have been saved.

Presenter John, Kisumu. 99,462 likes · 9,744 talking about this. ✅ .Presenter ✅ .Social Affairs Reporter ✅ . https://updatedmail.co.ke/ ✅ For...

March 2, 2026 - The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was the culmination of decades of painstaking intelligence gathering by Israeli secret services, with crucial technological resources and manpower provided over the last six months by the CIA and other US intelligence services, which culminated in a single concentrated burst of lethal violence to decapitate the Iranian regime, according to experts, veteran spies and officials in Israel and the US.

March 3, 2026 - By the end of Ayatollah Khamenei’s life, many Iranians viewed him as the dictator of a corrupt and repressive regime whose policies had killed thousands of Iranians and forced countless others into exile. During the past decade, as bouts of anti-government protests increased in frequency, Ayatollah Khamenei resorted to ever more brutal tactics.

March 1, 2026 - 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.

January 7, 2026 - The executions of the former regime’s government officials and army leaders right after the revolution, followed by the 1981 massacre in Iran initiated by a Fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader at the time, stand as a haunting reminder of the brutality that can accompany political transitions.

January 12, 2026 - The second is that, having engineered the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power in the first place — and suffered the consequences — Iranians will do anything to avoid another upheaval, the poor letting themselves be seduced by government handouts while judicious shows of force dissuade the middle class from taking to the streets.

March 4, 2026 - In the New York Times’ obituary of Khamenei, his role in Syria is mentioned, but not connected with the mass murder of civilians. Instead, the NY Times writes that the ayatollah “sent militia forces into Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad against Western backed rebels and Sunni jihadists.”

March 2, 2026 - Regular protests across Iran for greater political and social freedoms were brutally put down under his rule, as was unrest caused by economic misery. The repression of women also reached a new scale under Khamenei.

March 3, 2026 - This was the beginning of a pattern of escalating bloodthirstiness over the course of Khamenei’s tenure, which began the following year. Khamenei’s 36 years in power were characterised by his willingness to resort to extreme brutality against any and all threats to the regime.

March 3, 2026 - The scenes reflected the contradictions in how Khamenei was perceived: by some as a martyr, and by others as an oppressor. Demonstrators mourn the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Israeli consulate in Istanbul, on March 1, 2026.AP Photo/Khalil Hamra

March 1, 2026 - Iranian state TV confirms the supreme leader has been killed on the first day of massive US and Israeli air strikes on the country.

May 20, 2020 - Since it was founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, the clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been kept in power solely by the sheer brutality and violence rent upon the population by its elite military forces, and the spy network of its ministry of intelligence service.