When Khomeini died in 1989, the Assembly of Experts selected him as Supreme Leader, even though he did not rank among the highest clerical authorities. Over the following decades he entrenched his position by strengthening ties with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, shaping the judiciary and security services and placing loyalists in key institutions.
The record of repression associated with the Islamic Republic during his long tenure is extensive and well documented by international observers.
More than four decades of state violence
The darkest chapter predates his elevation to Supreme Leader but unfolded while he was president. Some opposition groups have claimed that the cumulative number of political opponents executed during the 1980s may have reached into the tens of thousands, figures that have not been independently verified.
In the summer of 1988 alone thousands of political prisoners were executed following summary proceedings. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International cite estimates ranging from roughly 2,800 to about 5,000 victims, while higher figures have been advanced by exiled opposition movements. Many were buried in unmarked graves. Iranian authorities have resisted independent investigation. The episode remains one of the gravest mass killings in the country’s modern history.
As Supreme Leader, Khamenei presided over a state that made sustained use of capital punishment. According to Amnesty International and other monitoring groups, Iran carried out at least 834 executions in 2023 and around 975 in 2024, the highest annual totals recorded in years. Early figures for 2025 suggested that the pace had not slowed. Many of those executed were convicted of drug offences or murder, but rights organisations have repeatedly criticised the use of vaguely defined security charges and trials that fall short of international standards.
The machinery of repression
Protest movements were also met with force. Demonstrations in 2009, 2019 and again after the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022 were suppressed by security units using live ammunition, mass arrests and sweeping prosecutions. Independent groups documented hundreds of deaths during the unrest of 2019 alone, with higher estimates disputed but widely circulated. Thousands more were detained.
In late December 2025 a fresh wave of nationwide unrest erupted across Iran, initially driven by economic hardship and rising prices but quickly taking on an openly political character. Security forces responded with lethal force. Human rights organisations reported that live ammunition was used against demonstrators in several cities and that mass arrests followed as the authorities imposed sweeping internet restrictions.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch described the crackdown in early January 2026 as one of the deadliest in recent years, documenting numerous unlawful killings and alleging coordinated use of force against largely unarmed civilians. Precise casualty figures remain contested. Some official figures referred to deaths in the thousands, while independent groups spoke of significantly higher tolls, noting that the communications blackout made full verification impossible. The events were widely seen by observers as a large-scale and deliberate deployment of deadly force to reassert control on the streets.
Behind prison walls, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented patterns of killings, torture and other abuses, including beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, coerced confessions and widespread sexual violence against detainees. The organisations argue that impunity for officials has been a recurring feature of the system.
Tehran’s handling of foreign nationals and dual citizens added another layer of controversy. Western governments accused the authorities of detaining individuals on security charges in order to gain diplomatic leverage, a practice often described as hostage diplomacy. In recent years several dual nationals were sentenced to death and executed after proceedings criticised abroad, heightening tensions with European capitals.
An Islamist vision and hostility to the West
Khamenei’s hostility towards the United States and Israel was rooted both in ideology and in history. As an Islamist committed to the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, he viewed clerical guardianship as divinely sanctioned and Western liberalism as a threat to the Islamic order. At the same time, the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with Western backing, support for the Shah, the devastation of the Iran–Iraq war and decades of sanctions reinforced a narrative of encirclement and resistance. Opposition to Washington and Jerusalem became not only a matter of faith but a pillar of state identity and a means of legitimising firmness at home.
Domestically he presided over the steady expansion of Iran’s nuclear programme, while abroad he cultivated a network of allied militias and movements stretching from Lebanon to Iraq, Syria and Yemen, a strategy presented in Tehran as deterrence and by its critics as destabilisation. Several of these conflicts, particularly in Syria and Yemen, have together claimed hundreds of thousands of lives over more than a decade.
Khamenei leaves behind a political structure built on loyalty to the clerical establishment and the security apparatus. Whether the transition that follows his death leads to continuity or upheaval will depend less on theology than on the cohesion of those institutions he spent decades consolidating.
