PARIS: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has weathered a series of challenges but Israel’s unprecedented strikes mark his most serious crisis yet, threatening both the clerical system he leads and his own physical survival.
Khamenei, Iran’s top leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, has ruled in the face of sanctions, near constant international tensions as well as protests that were ruthlessly repressed, most recently the 2022-2023 women-led uprising.
With Khamenei aged 86, the issue of succession was already looming large in Iran. But his moves now will have a decisive impact on the future on the system of which he has been a pillar since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted the shah.
Meanwhile, his own physical survival could be at stake, with a senior American official saying Donald Trump rejected an Israeli plan to kill Khamenei but Israel is still not ruling out such a move.
“Khamenei is at the twilight of his rule, at the age 86, and already much of the daily command of the regime is not up to him but to various factions who are vying for the future,” said Arash Azizi, senior fellow at Boston University.
“This process was already underway and the current war only accelerates it,” he told AFP.
Israel’s success in killing key Iranian figures, including the army chief and head of the Revolutionary Guards, has illustrated how Israeli intelligence can track Iranian leaders and raised the question of whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could give an order to seek to kill Khamenei himself.
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