Iran Obit Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
FILE - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, center, leaves an event titled "International Conference in Support of Palestinian Intifada," in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 21, 2017.
As featured on
Saturday’s military operation against Iran shows the dramatic evolution in risk tolerance that President Donald Trump has made in a matter of months. It was only last June that Trump had drawn a bright red line in rejecting an Israeli proposal to target Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At Israel’s urging during its 12-day war with Iran, Trump had agreed to deploy B-2 bombers to pummel three key Iranian nuclear sites, but worried that killing the cleric could destabilize the region. With Saturday’s strikes, those guardrails were tossed aside. Trump triumphantly announced the Ayatollah's death, part of a battle plan that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had greenlit.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who assembled theocratic power in Iran over the decades as its supreme leader and sought to turn it into a regional powerhouse, has died. He was 86. Iranian state media reported the death early Sunday, after a major attack launched by Israel and the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump said hours earlier that Khamenei had been killed in the joint operation. Khamenei dramatically remolded the Islamic Republic since he took the reins after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. He brought the country into confrontation with Israel and the United States over its nuclear program while crushing democracy protesters at home.
