When an Israeli airstrike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, the reaction from his own people told the story better than any obituary ever could.
Iranians poured into the streets — not to grieve, but to celebrate. “Khamenei is dead. This is the best day of my life.
This is a glorious day for Iran,” said Masoud Ghodrat Abadi, an Iranian engineer now based in the United States.
His words were echoed by millions across social media and in the streets of a country that had lived under the ayatollah’s iron grip for over three decades.
For the Western world, absorbing the news of a sitting head of state killed in a military strike is jarring.
But for the Iranian people — who survived mass executions, torture chambers, sexual violence used as a weapon of state, the deliberate impoverishment of millions, and the killing of their children in the streets — the reaction requires no explanation.
The question is not why Iranians celebrated. The question is why it took this long.
About Ali Hosseini Khamenei
Ali Hosseini Khamenei (19 April 1939 – 28 February 2026) was an Iranian politician and Shia cleric who served as Iran’s second supreme leader from 1989 until his death in 2026. He previously served as president of Iran from 1981 to 1989
Thirty-Six Years of Absolute Power
Khamenei came to power in 1989 following the death of revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
He was not an obvious successor — he lacked the deep religious credentials the constitution required, and the document was hastily amended to enable his elevation.
From that moment, he spent the rest of his life consolidating near-total control over every institution of Iranian life.
As Supreme Leader, Khamenei held direct authority over the judiciary, state media, all security forces including the feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and an unelected Guardian Council that vetted and disqualified electoral candidates at will.
Presidents came and went. Parliaments were elected and neutered. The ayatollah remained, immovable, presiding over a system designed to serve one purpose: the perpetuation of his own power.
The US State Department designated Iran under Khamenei the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and the US State Department’s annual human rights reports documented—year after year and decade after decade—a consistent pattern of crimes.
In the judgment of international legal scholars, the acts constituted crimes against humanity.
The Blood on His Hands: A Documented Record
The 1988 Massacre
Khamenei’s tenure began in bloodshed inherited from a crime he had actively supported. In the late summer of 1988, while serving as president, thousands of political prisoners — men and women who had already been sentenced, who were already serving time — were hauled before secret tribunals and executed under a fatwa.
The killings lasted weeks. Bodies were buried in mass graves. Families were never told. For decades, the Islamic Republic denied the massacre had happened at all.
Human rights lawyers and Human Rights Watch have characterised the 1988 massacre as a crime against humanity. The families of the victims are still seeking justice.
Crushing Protest After Protest
Every major popular uprising that emerged under Khamenei’s rule was met with the same response: bullets, mass arrests, torture, and forced confessions broadcast on state television.
The 1999 student protests were crushed. The 2009 Green Movement — which erupted after a presidential election widely believed to have been stolen — was suppressed with brutal force, dozens killed and thousands arrested, opposition leaders placed under house arrest for years without charge.
The 2017–18 protests, the 2019–20 uprising sparked by fuel price rises — each time, security forces opened fire on civilians. Each time, Khamenei gave the order or, in the damning phrase used repeatedly by Human Rights Watch, personally “greenlighted” the violence.
The November 2019 crackdown was among the most savage. Security forces deployed live ammunition against protesters blocking roads across the country, killing an estimated 200 to 1,500 people depending on the source — the internet blackout Khamenei ordered made an accurate count impossible.
Thousands were injured. Thousands more were detained and subjected to documented torture: beatings in overcrowded holding pens, fingernails ripped out, detainees forced to perform acts of humiliation at gunpoint.
Then came the final uprising. Beginning in late December 2025, with economic grievances spiralling into open demands for the Islamic Republic’s overthrow, Khamenei ordered security forces to open fire on his own people one last time.
According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, more than 7,000 civilians were killed. Some estimates put the figure as high as 20,000. A nationwide internet blackout was imposed to prevent the scale of the massacre from reaching the outside world.
The Murder of Mahsa Amini and the War on Women
In September 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa Jina Amini was arrested by Iran’s morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly.
Three days later she was dead. Iranian authorities claimed she had suffered a heart attack. Her family said she showed signs of a severe beating.
Her death triggered the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising — the most sustained challenge to the Islamic Republic’s authority in decades.
The regime’s response was to send its security forces into the streets with orders to kill. Protesters were shot with birdshot and live rounds.
According to documented reports from human rights organisations, women who were detained were subjected to sexual violence, gang rape, and torture in official detention centres and in clandestine facilities.
Children were among those killed. Protesters — including a nine-year-old boy, Kian Pirfalak — were shot dead. A 27-year-old wrestler, Navid Afkari, was executed after a trial that Amnesty International described as a “grossly unfair sham.”
Khamenei’s own publicly stated position on women was that gender equality represented “one of the biggest mistakes of Western thought.”
Under the legal system he oversaw, the value of a woman’s testimony in court was set at half that of a man’s. Marital rape was not a criminal offence.
The legal age of criminal responsibility — and therefore the age at which the state could execute a child — was set at nine for girls and thirteen for boys.
According to the US State Department’s 2023 human rights report, a total of 798 Iranians were executed that year alone — a 37 percent increase on the previous year.
Torture as State Policy
Across decades of Amnesty International reports, the documentation is relentless and consistent. Torture of detainees was “common and widespread” and “committed with impunity.” Floggings were ordered by courts and carried out routinely.
Amputations were a legal punishment. Prisoners died in custody from beatings and denial of medical care. At least 2,134 people were flogged between 2000 and 2020, including 17 who were minors at the time.
In 2021, hacked surveillance footage from inside a prison showed guards beating and dragging inmates. No one was ever prosecuted.
The European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Iran’s human rights record. The European Union issued formal statements of concern in 2005, 2007, and 2008.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission passed resolution after resolution. Iran’s response was consistent: it suspended dialogue with the EU on human rights and retaliated against witnesses who had testified to UN experts.
Impoverishment and Economic Control
As ordinary Iranians faced hyperinflation, a collapsing currency and deepening poverty—driven in part by decades of sanctions tied to Khamenei’s nuclear ambitions—the IRGC he empowered built a vast commercial empire across the economy.
State institutions enriched themselves, and the public paid the price.
A Global Sponsor of Violence
Inside Iran’s borders, Khamenei killed his own people. Outside them, he funded and armed proxy forces across the region.
The IRGC’s Quds Force supplied weapons, training, and financing to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria.
Iran under Khamenei provided the drones that Russia used to kill Ukrainian civilians. His forces helped prop up Bashar al-Assad in Syria as Assad murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people.
The US State Department’s designation of Iran as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism was not rhetoric. It was a conclusion supported by evidence.
Justice, Not Mourning
President Donald Trump, announcing Khamenei’s death, called him “one of the most evil people in History” and described his killing as “justice” — for Americans killed by Iranian-backed forces over the decades, and for the Iranian people themselves.
It is a claim that is difficult to argue with on the merits. The international legal framework is clear that targeted killings of heads of state are deeply problematic under the laws of war.
The geopolitical consequences of the strike that killed Khamenei are profound and uncertain. These are legitimate debates.
But moral clarity about the man himself requires no equivocation. The record assembled by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and the US State Department over three decades is not contested in its essential findings.
Ali Khamenei presided over a system of mass murder, systematic torture, institutionalised sexual violence, the execution of children, the starvation of a nation, and the suppression of every peaceful attempt his people made to reclaim their freedom.
He was not a controversial figure in the way that term is usually applied to complex political leaders whose records contain genuine achievements alongside their failures.
He ordered soldiers to shoot protesters in the street and approved the torture of women detained for removing their hijabs. He funded wars that destabilised the Middle East and was responsible for the killing of thousands of his own citizens whose only “crime” was demanding a better life.
He spent decades building a system that crushed dissent, silenced journalists, and treated basic freedoms like a threat to be stamped out. Women were policed, minorities were targeted, and anyone who dared to challenge the regime risked prison, violence, or worse.
This wasn’t “strength” or “leadership” — it was rule by fear, backed by brutality and impunity. The world doesn’t need more men like that in power; it needs truth, justice, and a future where ordinary people aren’t punished for wanting dignity.
The Iranian people who danced in the streets when they learned he was dead were not celebrating violence. They were celebrating the end of it.
