Born in Iran's holiest city of Mashhad in the north east of the country, Ali Hosseini Khamenei was the sixth out of eight children born to Javad Khamenei and his second wife Khadijeh. His adolescence was spent immersed in poetry, novels and literature and he even composed a couple of his own poems from the age of 16-years-old. He opposed the Shah of Iran’s reign during the 1960s and 70s while teaching in Birjand at a religious school. Following several arrests, he was exiled from Iran in 1976 but when the Shah was overthrown, he returned. In the early years of the Islamic Republic, he was for a short time Vice Minister of National Defence and later a supervisor of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Just before he was elected President of Iran, Khamenei was almost assassinated by a bomb concealed in a tape recorder which saw him sustain injury to his vocal cords, right arm and lungs. The damage to the arm forced him to use his left hand for things like hand shaking with other people. His presidency saw conflicts with neighbouring Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War and serious talks with North Korea’s Supreme leader Kim Il-Sung, whose grandson Kim Jong-Un is the current leader of the isolated republic. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini appointed Khamenei to be his political successor as his health worsened, That role would later be fulfilled in June of that same year when Khomeini kicked the bucket.

Like his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini, Khamenei cracked down on blasphemy towards Islam and women who wore their hijabs incorrectly according to Iranian laws. He was represented in Lebanon by Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. He was willing to expel Iranian nationals if they were to appear in what he deemed as "American propaganda" or even appearing in their birthday suits for a foreign magazine and one notorious example of this was when he banned Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani from returning to Iran or even working in Iran after her appearance in Body of Lies in 2009 which led to her taking up residence in France where she now has dual citizenship. The usual restriction of free speech and clampdown on Western or otherwise outside influence found in other dictatorships was alive and kicking in Khamenei’s Iran. Should a cartoon get dubbed into Persian or any languages prominent in Iran, anything seen as obscene would be censored like SpongeBob character Sandy Cheek’s tree-dome outfit in SpongeBob being awkwardly covered with a short sleeved, flowy purple dress that lacks a black outline in the unlicensed Persian dub.

In early 2026, many pro-Pahlavi revolutionaries took to Iranian streets to protest against the theocracy and he took measures to suppress them like cutting off their access to the internet as well as having Starlink devices jam afterwards.

He also sent the Revolutionary Guards after the rebels and some of these guards ended up being killed. In the end, it wasn't a pro-Shah revolutionary or one of his loyal cronies taking him out but rather an Israeli missile strike (backed by the US) on 28th February 2026. It would take almost 24 hours for Iranian state media to confirm his death. Many pro-Shah revolutionaries were overjoyed by his assassination. His loyal cronies were left blubbering waterfalls.

He was succeeded by his son Mojtaba Khamenei who now has to deal with any revolutionary uprising against the theocracy without his dad helping him.

He was only interred in July 2026 after 4 months of Iranian-Israeli-American conflict following a tentative truce at the Imam Reza shrine in his birthplace of Mashhad.