Ali Khamenei (born 17 July 1939) was the President of Iran from 13 October 1981 to 3 August 1989 (succeeding Mohammed-Ali Rajai, preceding Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani) and Supreme Leader of Iran from 4 June 1989, succeeding Ayatollah Khomeini.
Biography[]
Khameini in the hospital, 1981
Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1939. He claimed patrilineal descent from Imam Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad and the father of Hussein ibn Ali. Khamenei's father was an Azeri and his mother was a Persian-speaker from Yazd. Formerly an Imam, he became a leading politician in the government after the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the Shah.
In 1981, while serving as Deputy Minister of Defense of Iran, he lost the use of his right arm after a bomb hidden in a tape recorder exploded and injured him. After the assassination of President Mohammed-Ali Rajai, he became the next President of Iran, and inherited the role of commanding Iran's forces in the Iran-Iraq War. Khameini had to deal with the rival country of Iraq, led by the dictator Saddam Hussein, and waged a World War I-style war that was the longest conventional war of the 1980s.
In 1989, after Ayatollah Khomeini's death, Khamenei became the new Supreme Leader of Iran, an Islamic title rather than a political title. However, he held immense power in Iran due to the fact that almost all Iranians were devout Shi'ites, and in 2015 he was the face of Iran during its negotiations with the United States and United Nations to lift their embargoes in Iran in exchange for Iran not working on a nuclear weapons program. Despite popular backlash in the USA, on 18 October 2015 the deal was adopted, and the "anytime, anywhere" inspections condition and the hostage release conditions were dropped in negotiations with Iran. This led to Iran being able to test a medium-ranged ballistic missile on 8 December. During his tenure as Supreme Leader of Iran, Iran gave its support to the Popular Mobilization Forces of Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic during the Iraqi Civil War and Syrian Civil War, respectively, with Iran being involved in two major civil wars in their proxy conflict with Saudi Arabia. In addition, Iran gave tacit support to the Houthis of Yemen, and Iran's activities increased tension with Saudi Arabia and the West due to their intervention in Middle East crises.