THIS IS HOW THEY CAME TO ELIMINATION OF ALI KHAMENEI - Filenews 2/3
By Paul Iddon
February 28, 2026 is now a landmark date in the history of Iran and the Middle East. The joint U.S. and Israeli attack, codenamed "Operation: Epic Fury" and "Roar of the Lion," annihilated the Iranian leadership and destroyed Tehran's missile program. According to many reports, it was an unprecedented attack in terms of scale and coordination. Iran's longtime supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead.
The future of Iran and the region is uncertain. But it is clear that the attack that killed Khamenei did not happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of a long-standing confrontation between the Iranian leader and the forces in the region, the poor economic management and the authoritarian policy he implemented. A series of events dating back to President Trump's first term and continuing until Hamas' attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, led to Khamenei's death.
At the end of 2023, many observers predicted that 2024 would be a succession year in Iran. The 80-year-old Khamenei prioritized the survival and continuation of the Islamic regime he "inherited" in 1989.
Inside the country, the Ayatollah regime had just emerged from the 2022 wave of "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests, demanding an end to restrictions on women, such as the mandatory wearing of the hijab. Regionally, Hamas has sparked an unprecedented war with Israel.
For years, Iran and its most powerful regional representative, Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been planning a cross-border operation in Israel's northern Galilee, with massacres and hostages. Hamas, in a sense, caught up with them – with fatal consequences. The Lebanese Shiite group, led by Hassan Nasrallah, had amassed, with Iran's support and financial resources, a larger and more sophisticated arsenal of missiles than Hamas, theoretically capable of causing destruction in major Israeli cities. He did not use them in a large-scale attack. Instead, Hezbollah tried to engage Israeli forces in low-intensity exchanges of fire on the border, calculating that it could avoid an uncontrolled escalation into a full-blown war.
Hezbollah was the "diamond in the crown" of a regional network, calling itself the "Axes of Resistance", which Iran coordinated. It included paramilitary groups throughout the region. Hezbollah's influence and authority over these groups suffered a significant blow after Qassem Soleimani, Khamenei's right-hand man, was killed in a drone attack on his car in Baghdad on January 3, 2020.
Soleimani, unlike Khamenei, had a charismatic personality: he organized and controlled these militias as head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. A few months before Trump ordered his assassination, Soleimani played a key role in violently cracking down on a peaceful protest movement of young people in Iraq protesting rampant corruption and Iran's excessive influence in their country's internal affairs, including the killing of unarmed protesters by sniper fire. The event was described as "the Tiananmen of Iraq".
Iran reacted a few days later, hitting military bases in Iraq with ballistic missiles. No American soldiers were killed, but some were wounded.
Tehran had set a precedent for how it would retaliate in the future.
On April 13, 2024, Khamenei ordered another attack. After Israel destroyed the branch of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Tehran felt it had to retaliate with its first direct attack on Israel. It first launched drones, and a few hours later a wave of ballistic missiles followed. Israel, the U.S. and their allies had plenty of time to prepare their defenses: they intercepted most of the missiles fired by Iran. President Joe Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate, asking him to "accept victory". Israel settled for a small-scale attack a few days later.
Israel would act more boldly on July 31, in an attack in Tehran where senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh was killed. Khamenei promised that Iran would retaliate for Haniya's death. Of course, he did not know that soon the leader of his most important ally in the region, Hezbollah, would be dead.
Nasrallah's risk of avoiding a major escalation with Israel cost him his life. Israel escalated its operations on the northern front in September 2024 with an airstrike and a historic covert operation that caused thousands of bombers to explode simultaneously, injuring Hezbollah members. None of Hezbollah's long-awaited, large-scale rocket attacks against Israel took place. Then, in a move that in retrospect foreshadowed Khamenei's death, Israel targeted the Nasrallah bunker on September 27 with powerful airstrikes that rocked Beirut.
Iran reacted immediately again, this time using only ballistic missiles without warning, on October 1. Although these attacks were more powerful than those of April, Israel endured. It returned fire on October 26, with a series of precision airstrikes targeting Iranian missile installations and air defense systems, including several Russian S-300s. Biden's Middle East adviser, Amos Hochstein, commented that Iran was "essentially naked" after attacks on these systems.
These attacks had a direct impact on Khamenei's security. Satellite images had recorded movements of an S-300 that coincided with the Iranian supreme leader's residence points in the city of Mashhad.
Before their deaths, Soleimani and Nasrallah coordinated Iran's efforts to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad during the bloody civil war in Syria that began in 2011. Hezbollah intervened in the conflict in early 2013. In one of the group's harshest actions, Hezbollah forces participated in the siege of about 40,000 people in the Syrian city of Madaya, subjecting civilians, including children, to excruciating starvation.
With its supporters from Iran and Hezbollah wavering and Russia focusing on its war with Ukraine, the brutal Assad regime was nearing its end. His opponents led him into humiliating exile in Moscow and overthrew the regime on December 8, 2024. Syria's new leaders have barred the Revolutionary Guards from entering the country, which until then had been a crucial land corridor for supplying Hezbollah.
2024 ended with the axis weakened and Khamenei not having initiated the procedures for a smooth succession. And as if all this wasn't enough, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and was returning for a second term in the White House. Whether Khamenei realized it or not, his days were now numbered.
On June 13, 2025, Netanyahu announced the launch of Operation "Rising Lions" after a series of Israeli airstrikes on Iran, which killed several military commanders with astonishing accuracy. A 12-day war ensued, with Israeli fighter jets dominating Iranian skies and targeting the country's missile and nuclear facilities. Iran responded with more ballistic missile attacks against Israel. The possibility of Khamenei being killed in his bunker was openly discussed by Trump and in the US media. Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer toward the end of the 12-day war, in which B-2 Spirit strategic bombers struck Iran's main nuclear facilities with powerful bombs. Iran responded with another announced ballistic missile attack against a regional air base hosting US forces, this time Al-Udeid in Qatar. The war ended shortly after.
Khamenei started 2026 with the most fateful move of his life. With Iranians across the country protesting the appalling living conditions and oppression under his regime, the Revolutionary Guards loyal to Iran's supreme leader and the Islamic militia Basij cut off the internet and communications in the country. Khamenei's forces then massacred unarmed protesters, using all means: from heavy machine guns against crowds of protesters to knives at individuals. The dead may have exceeded 30.000, while the confirmed murders were over 7.000. Whatever the exact number, surely this was the largest massacre of protesters in Iran's modern history.
From then on there was no turning back.
Trump condemned the killings of protesters and pledged to help the Iranian people. The bloody repression culminated on January 8-9. Trump ordered the reinforcement of US military forces in the region. Their numbers were reminiscent of days in 2003, shortly before Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq. At the same time, Iranian officials participated in "indirect" and ultimately ineffective negotiations on Tehran's nuclear program, with Washington clearly wanting to buy time as its forces concentrated near Iran. On February 28, Israel and the US attacked Iran, Tehran responded by targeting Israel but also US bases and civilian infrastructure in Arab countries in the Gulf and Iraqi Kurdistan. Khamenei, as Netanyahu announced, "no longer existed" at the end of the day.
Khamenei had irrevocably sealed his fate in January by murdering Iranian civilians. After his death, there is great uncertainty as to whether this regime can survive and proceed to a smooth succession in the midst of war, or whether the people of Iran will heed Trump's call and put an end to the regime that Khamenei tried tooth and nail to keep in power for another generation.
It was unrealistic to expect that Khamenei would "relax" his political stance or that he would ever admit his mistakes. He remained a fundamentalist until the end.
"What we should not expect from Khamenei is a conversion while he lives," Alex Watanka prophetically wrote in his book "The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran" published in 2021.
"He is willing to take all his mistakes with him to the grave and will never apologize for his decisions."
