Sayonara, Ayatollah

With the fiery demise of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the world has one less anti-western fanatic in the Middle East to worry about.

January 20, 2007.

12 men from Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq storm into a command center in the Iraqi city of Karbala during a meeting between American soldiers and local officials. Once inside, one American soldier is killed and four captured in the ensuing gunfight. The four captive American soldiers are then swiftly bound and hauled outside before being gunned down in cold blood — execution style. Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, also known as the Khazali Network, is an Iraqi Shia militant organization who has spread nothing but death and terror in Iraq and Syria since it was founded in 2006. Like all Iraqi Shia militants, the Khazali Network answers to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Planet Earth’s #1 sponsor of international terrorism. And the IRGC, at least until Saturday, answers to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Born in 1939 in the Iranian city of Mashhad, Khamenei spent his early life in Islamic seminaries, where he encountered none other than Ruhollah Khomeini, the firebrand revolutionary cleric devoted to toppling Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The pair quickly became inseparable, with Khomeini as mentor and Khamenei as protégé. When Khomeini was forced into exile in 1964, Khamenei was his main soldier for Islamic revival in a country directed by Pahlavi to embark on precisely the opposite path. Tortured for years by the Shah’s secret police SAVAK, whose main sponsors were the United States and Israel, Khamenei developed a passionate and lifelong hatred for the Great Satan and the Zionist Regime, as Tehran frequently labels the two nations.

Following Shah Pahlavi’s downfall in 1979 and the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei was elected President of Iran, his status as the man now called Ayatollah (Sign of God) Khomeini’s right-hand man restored— only this time not as a rebel but as the embodiment of the political and security establishment. Following Ruhollah Khomenei’s death in 1989, Khamenei was his obvious successor. Since then, he has ruled Iran with an iron fist as a hub for international terrorism. Repeatedly undermining electoral mandates by the Iranian people for reformist political candidates, Khamenei’s mission as Iran’s Supreme Leader was not to protect the welfare of the Iranian people. Instead, it was to cleanse the Middle East of the corrupting influence of the United States and Western-aligned institutions and rulers in order to hasten the destruction of the State of Israel in order to hasten the apocalyptic arrival of the Prophet Mohammed’s 12^th Imam (Al-Mahdi) and restore the global body of Muslims (Ummah) to a rightful state of justice.

In practice, Khamenei’s revolutionary doctrine has plunged the Middle East into a state of perpetual conflict.

The cold-blooded quadruple murder in Karbala in 2007 was merely a drop in the bucket among the blood spilled by brave American servicemembers on Khamenei’s orders. For the period between 2003 and 2011 alone, the peak of the Iraq War, The US Department of Defense (I still prefer this title to Department of War) estimated at least 608 American troop deaths were directly attributed to militias and insurgents operating at the behest of Khamenei and an Iranian regime whose conduct has crossed the threshold in my opinion into the realm of the demonic. In 2010, the British publication Sunday Times released a bombshell report exposing how the Iranian government had paid Taliban militants $1,000 for each American soldier killed in Afghanistan. Never mind that the Taliban were Sunni, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is Shia. Apparently just enough flexibility exists in Tehran when it comes to their explicitly stated mission of Death to America.

Except now, it is not America or Israel who has perished, but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Following months of intensive surveillance, on February 28, 2026, both of Khamenei’s mortal enemies spotted a golden opportunity to deliver the man who had long preached their destruction directly to his 72 virgins. The normally cautious Supreme Leader, who has spent the past few years living a secretive lifestyle, slipped his guard last Saturday when he called a meeting of some of his top officials in broad daylight at his main compound in the heart of Tehran. Following a disastrous round of diplomacy in Geneva where force was explicitly threatened by chief negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner should Washington’s demands be rejected, President Donald Trump decided that diplomacy had reached the end of the road. When Khamenei, along with other top Iranian officials such as defense minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and IRGC chief Mohammad Pakpour were making their sinister plans, Israeli Air Force jets were already in the air with this compound in their bullseye.

A few kabooms later, the compound was in ruins, and every single one of these men, including the Supreme Leader himself were handed a fate they most deserved.

It’s difficult for me to generate one iota of sympathy for Ali Khamenei. Not only did this vile cleric have the blood of at least hundreds and likely thousands of Americans, along with a horrifying 37,000 Iranian citizens simply asking for bread over bombs stained on his hands forever, but he also seemed to conclude quite a long time ago that he would rather endure martyrdom than sacrifice his apocalyptic regional ambitions. While some newspapers unfortunately interpreted his legacy through rose-colored glasses, this author will not. Beyond the Niagara Falls of aforementioned atrocities, Khamenei and his terrorist regime made the unforgivable and appalling decision to target civilian infrastructure in so-called “Gulf States” across the Persian Gulf. Never mind that every single one of these countries, from The United Arab Emirates to Qatar bent over backwards to assure Tehran of their neutrality. Even Oman, the mediator in Geneva, was not spared from the wrath of the remnants of the IRGC.

By brazenly attacking neutral countries, the Islamic Republic of Iran has shattered years of painstaking regional diplomacy. Instead of cleansing the Middle East of traitors and heretics and accelerating the return of the doomsday 12^th Imam, Khamenei’s legacy is one of Iran as a regional and now global pariah with a catatonic economy, deeply unhappy domestic populace, and a leadership buried under rubble. Whether his successors, however they come about, follow his ruinous path or embark on a new, more positive direction is now up to the people of Iran. Ali Khamenei will not be missed.