Death to Khamenei
Reflections on the assassination of a monster
“You are hated across the world! If you don’t know this, you should! The people burn your flag! The Islamic peoples all over the world chant, Death to America!”
– Ali Khamenei in response to President Obama’s diplomatic outreach in 2009.
Khamenei is dead. Death to Khamenei.
It’s hard to know the pleasure Edward R. Murrow must’ve felt when he became the first journalist, reporting for CBS News from London in 1945, to announce the death of Adolf Hitler. I am certainly not the first to report Khamenei’s death. But I imagine the feeling was not terribly different. When I heard the news, like many Iranians, I felt relief. I thought of my Iranian loved ones and their families. But also, like many Iranians, I understood this victory could come at such a devastating cost it may be the same as losing. We could end up in a protracted war. Iranian society could collapse into even darker chaos. We could see economic shocks and regional instability ripple across Gulf economies. Domestic conflict could fracture along ethnic and tribal lines. If Tehran blocks or disrupts the Strait of Hormuz, global oil prices will spike and stock markets will fall. And, for all this, the regime may still be standing when the dust settles. But on the other hand, Khamenei, who ruled from 1989 until his assassination on Saturday, and who was the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East and the longest-serving Iranian leader since the Shah, had become one of the most evil dictators on the planet. Eliminating him may come at great cost, but leaving him in power was hardly a peaceful alternative.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of slavery as a grave moral wrong and of the Civil War as perhaps a form of divine judgment against both sides for tolerating the practice. His point was that if justice demands a terrible cost, then we must recognize that cost as just. Not to celebrate it, but to accept and solemnly pay the price. Truly, there are only a few genuine slave states in the world today, by which I mean places where every living person is effectively a slave. North Korea is such a place. The entire country is essentially one massive concentration camp. Eritrea, Syria, and Iran too. But the list is short because few countries in the world are so unfree. Nothing in China or even Russia comes close. However, while North Korea and Syria are too crippled by their own dysfunction to have any meaningful impact beyond their own borders, Iran is quite powerful by comparison, earning significant revenue from crude oil and petroleum products, despite international sanctions. It uses the profits to tighten the screws on its people and terrorize the world by funding terrorist groups in half a dozen countries. Iran has also tried for decades to develop nuclear weapons and its leaders, especially Khamenei, have repeatedly said they want to destroy Israel. Now Iranians, who have suffered in hell for half a century, might finally be free. It’s too early to say, but should this end with elections, it will be America’s greatest victory in the name of democracy since we defeated the Nazis.
But what makes Khamenei so uniquely bad? Being a brutal dictator who kills thousands of his own people is not enough to stand out in the Muslim world, sadly. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurdish civilians of Iraq and carried out mass executions, torture, and political purges. In Syria, Hafez al-Assad ordered the Hama massacre. In Sudan, Omar al-Bashir carried out the Darfur genocide. In Iran, Khamenei’s predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini oversaw extensive political purges and executions. But Khamenei did something that would set him apart from every other Muslim dictator in history. Simply put, he became the father of Islamofascism, and he did this by fusing theocratic authority with state bureaucratic power. Other Muslim dictators — monarchs in Saudi Arabia or secular military strongmen in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq — have ruled through state institutions or personal command, but Khamenei institutionalized clerical authority itself into the core organs of state power. His office became an administrative and executive nerve center that controlled the military, courts, media, everything. Such constitutionalized clerical supremacy is unique in the Muslim world. He then made the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) the brutal spine of his regime, using it like an Iranian Schutzstaffel (SS) to enforce control and literally kill reform movements.
Khamenei was no less bloodthirsty than his counterparts in Syria or Sudan, but he possessed an apparatus of surveillance and police violence that allowed him to execute his will with greater severity and precision than Assad or Bashir could ever imagine. Khamenei regularly executed dissidents and violently repressed protests in 1999, 2009, 2019, and 2022. He never carried out an industrial genocide comparable to Hussein’s campaign in Anfal or Bashir’s campaign in Darfur, but the domestic brutalization of his people was more systematic and universal. His security forces and militias carried out systematic campaigns of torture, rape, and murder against the people of Iran. To give just one example, when the 22-year-old Masha Amini didn’t wear her headscarf properly, police murdered her in September 2022. When people protested, security forces arrested almost 20,000 citizens, killed over 500, held public trials for over 1,000, and executed several. Protests broke out more recently after the collapse of the Iranian rial, which plunged to historic lows in late December 2025, putting unbearable pressure on shop keepers and merchants in Tehran. The protests soon expanded to include broader political discontent. The government responded by throwing the nation into an internet blackout and slaughtering up to 30,000 people in the darkness. Men and women protesters, including minors, are currently being gang raped in custody before being killed.
Iran also visits hell upon the rest of the world by supporting various terrorist groups with funding, weapons, and training. This includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi movement in Yemen. In Gaza and the West Bank, Iran supports Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. Iran supports Al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada in Iraq and Syria, Fatemiyoun Division in Syria and Afghanistan, Zeinabiyoun Brigade in Syria and Pakistan — as well as Harakat al-Nujaba, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, and Al-Mukhtar Brigades in Iraq. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel, attacked kibbutzim and towns, shot civilians in their homes and at a music festival, set houses on fire, killed families at close range, and abducted more than 200 people, including children and the elderly, dragging them back into dark tunnels under Gaza as hostages. Hamas and multiple other groups were directly responsible, but Iran was the puppet master. Hezbollah’s long record includes suicide bombings such as the 1983 Beirut barracks attack, which killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers, as well as rocket campaigns deliberately aimed at civilian population centers in northern Israel during the 2006 war, forcing mass evacuations and killing non-combatants. In Syria, Hezbollah units and Iran-organized militias fought alongside the Assad regime, which used sarin and chlorine gas against its own people in Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Shaykhun in 2017, which makes breathing painful, fills your lungs with fluid, and drowns you in your own phlegm. And yes, Iran helped Syria develop those chemical weapons too.
In his address announcing Khamenei’s assassination, President Trump said:
From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts. And it was Iran’s proxy, Hamas, that launched the monstrous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. … Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. … They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore. … For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally obliterated. We’re going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces … To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. … Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.
Prediction markets tend to have some interesting takes on geopolitical events and the major ones are currently trying to forecast Khamenei’s successor. On Polymarket, 36% of forecasters say the next supreme leader of Iran will be Alireza Arafi, the hardliner cleric who has served as head of Iran’s seminaries since 2016, while only 13% say it will be Hassan Khomeini, Ruhollah’s grandson, and only 9% say Mojtaba Khamenei, the second eldest child of Ali Khamenei. On Kalshi, 37% say it will be Arafi while only 14% name Mojtaba. But only 43% of forecasters on Polymarket say the regime will fall by June 30 and only 20% on Metaculus say the U.S. will control Tehran within one year. So the crowdsourced betting is basically saying the successor gets named pretty quickly, but there’s real uncertainty about whether the system holds together or the whole thing crumbles.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts Iran’s allies. China and Russia have both got huge investments in Iran’s oil and infrastructure, but they’re not gonna ride in and save Khamenei’s regime militarily. Also, what of Khamenei’s whole strategy with the “Axis of Resistance” network made up of terrorist groups? With him gone, all those proxy relationships get wobbly. This could end up being the terrorist version of the Soviet collapse in 1991, after which all the states propped up by Soviet cashflows rapidly shriveled. But one thing is certain, Israel has truly had a remarkable run. They decimated Hamas leadership in Gaza through sustained airstrikes and ground operations, took out Hezbollah’s command structure with that staggering pager operation that killed thousands with a Thanos snap, and now they’ve just eliminated Iran’s supreme leader in a joint operation with the United States. Israel has fundamentally reshaped the regional balance of power in its favor in just a few months. The Israel Century is dawning.
Now we get to watch who fills the power vacuum. Will it be reformers or hardliners? Will the IRGC consolidate power around a single leader and maintain business as usual? Or will we see a prolonged power struggle between factions that last months and makes energy markets unpriceable? Or will one of the most destabilizing and horrific places in the world become a liberal democracy? Will Iranians overseas now be able to visit their homeland before they die? Unfortunately, I am not as hopeful as I would like to be. History suggests that killing a long-entrenched leader often hardens political rule and can escalate conflict, especially when their loyalists fill the halls of power and number in the thousands. This may prove to be a momentary tactical triumph that only propels decades of even more instability. In the end, I fear the only way theocracy will ever leave Iran is the same way it came in. Namely, through violent popular revolution. So maybe killing Khamenei doesn’t give Iran its freedom back. But it sure as hell kicks down the door. Besides, a moral victory is only a loss to a cynic.
Khamenei is gone but will the oppressive structure he created also fall?
It would be great if a pro-democracy group took over but they need mass support and guns.
Those who are entrenched in the current regime have a lot to lose so they will resist regime change with everything they have.
Before you mentioned it, IRGC=SS was just what you described. Any true liberty in Iraq will require the equivalent of de-Nazification, and that could take years if Iran can do it at all. Because of its theological roots, the useful idiots who wave Palestinian flags on university campuses will support this tool of Islamic domination.