Middle eastern strongmen seldom enjoy tidy exits. Libya’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, died in a ditch outside Sirte. In Iraq Saddam Hussein was hauled from a hole and hanged after a perfunctory trial. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7th 2023, hurled a stick at a combat drone. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 37 years, appears to have chosen a different end: martyrdom.
He carefully prepared for succession. He lined up replacements for officials he expected Israel and America to assassinate. He named a wartime commander, Ali Larijani, to run affairs in his absence. And he readied his followers for what was to come. In his final address on February 16th he invoked the defining tragedy of Shiism: the last battle of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, against the Sunni caliph, Yazid, at Karbala. “No one like me will pledge allegiance to someone like Yazid,” he declared, quoting the seventh-century martyr. He brushed aside the advisers who begged him to leave for the hardened bunker they had prepared (with the help of a foreign ally) to resist overwhelming air power, say his clerics and Gulf intelligence reports.
And then, as Israeli bombs rained down on his compound in downtown Tehran, he remained there with his family. “He decided to remain in his known compound fully aware of the operational risks. This was a personal and political decision,” reads a Gulf intelligence report. Iran watchers agree. “He orchestrated his death,” says Ali Alizadeh, a commentator close to Iranian hardliners. “He was afraid of dying an undignified death and wanted his death to attract rather than subtract from the war.”
His foes had thought his demise might trigger the collapse of a brittle, ideologically spent regime, much as it did those of Qaddafi and Saddam. Instead, by wrapping himself in the iconography of the martyrdom, he may have revived it. In a country which had seemed to be losing its religion, mourners flooded streets that recently resounded with calls for the dictator’s downfall and where protesters had been slaughtered. Officials who only days earlier had urged talks with America are now dismissive of ceasefires with the “Great Satan”. Ineffectual placemen have given way to hardliners. In mosques and on state television, the language of sacrifice—so potent during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s—has returned. “The Islamic Republic’s legitimacy was at its lowest but with [Khamenei’s] martyrdom it’s revived,” suggests Ali Mamouri, an Iran expert who has spent many years in the country. “Many Iranians have to find some affiliation with the system again.” Mr Alizadeh agrees: “I’ve never seen the faithful so energised.”
The rulers’ resilience is not just due to ideology. The regime is more complex than other Middle Eastern dictatorships and has more organisational depth. And it was always going to be a tall order to topple the regime from the air. But the extent of the appeal to the Shia tradition of martyrdom could yet be a factor in determining how long and how desperately the Islamic Republic keeps fighting and how many casualties Iran’s forces can endure. Around 1,300 Iranian soldiers have been killed in the first three days of the bombardment, according to a field report from a Kurdish human-rights group with a presence on the ground. Iranian officials acknowledge that their arsenal is no match for American and Israeli armoury. But ideology, they argue, can sustain a prolonged and asymmetrical war of attrition, just as in the 1980s when for eight years it drove hundreds of thousands to their deaths on the battlefield against Iraq.
An internet blackout makes public opinion hard to gauge. The loathing for Khamenei has surely not dissipated but those who once chanted death to the dictator are now indoors, sheltering from American and Israeli bombardment. Fear that their cities could be reduced to rubble like those of Gaza may also have swayed some against supporting the attackers. It has also galvanised ideologues, including the 6m Iranians Mr Mamouri estimates followed Khamenei’s fatwas, or religious opinions. And it has given a new lease of life to the regime’s anti-American and anti-Zionist slogans, of which most Iranians had tired.
Beyond Iran’s borders, the imagery of martyrdom resonates, too. Millions of Shias worldwide recognised Khamenei’s spiritual authority. Clerics with followers across the Shia world have declared a jihad to avenge his killing. In Karachi, in southern Pakistan, protesters attempting to storm the American consulate were killed; in Baghdad, in Iraq, crowds tried to breach security cordons near the American embassy. Iran’s allies abroad may be stirring. The Houthis in Yemen, which previously lobbed missiles at Israeli and Saudi Arabia and severely disrupted shipping in the Red Sea, remain poised. Hizbullah has resumed limited missile fire at Israel. Iraqi militias have struck near Erbil, the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, where American forces are based. Fears that a triumphant region-wide Sunni coalition—backed by America, Turkey and Israel—might again threaten Shia communities are prompting preparations for a broader sectarian conflagration.
The restraints that Khamenei’s “strategic patience” put on his hardliners are also gone. Since his death, Iran has attacked its Gulf neighbours with hundreds of missiles and drones. Iran-watchers predict they will ditch his fatwa against nuclear weaponisation, and seek to produce inter-continental missiles he opposed. The balance of power in Tehran has shifted accordingly. Before his killing, pragmatists had topped Iran-watchers’ lists of Khamenei’s likely successors. Hassan Khomeini, the reformist grandson of the republic’s founder, and Hassan Rouhani, the former president who negotiated the nuclear deal with America and other global powers in 2015, were front-runners. Both favoured a rapprochement with the West.
Instead, Alireza Arafi, the cleric elevated to the three-man committee that took power on Khamenei’s death, is an ideological hardliner. He was the head of al-Mustafa, the seminary in Qom that trains foreign students to export Iran’s revolution. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard, has also tightened its grip. It has replaced Iran’s border guards with its own forces in vulnerable provinces such as Kurdistan, and replaced its assassinated chief with Ahmad Vahidi, the first commander of the IRGC’s foreign arm, the Quds Force. He is accused of building up Hizbullah and orchestrating attacks against Jewish targets abroad. “He’s a very bad person, even worse than the one who was assassinated,” says Sima Shine, a former Mossad operative and Iran watcher.
It is possible that, once the guns fall silent, Iran’s many resolutely secular-minded people will again assert themselves. A post-Khamenei—or even post-regime—Iran might yet seek reconciliation with the West. A pragmatic commander could emerge, intent on a smooth transition to salvage what remains of the republic’s considerable assets at home and in the Gulf principalities it has been bombing. Ethnic insurgencies on the periphery might fracture a defeated state. For now the war has postponed such reckonings. But by dying what his followers hail as a martyr’s death Khamenei may have prolonged the life of the system he built, even if he cannot save it.