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Iranian Australians celebrate death of supreme leader and dream with ‘quiet anticipation’ of regime change

The memories of all those murdered by the Iranian regime were at the forefront of Sahar Gholizadeh’s mind when she heard that the country’s supreme leader had been killed. “I started shaking, and I started crying, remembering all of those beautiful lives that we lost, and all of those people that would be so happy to see this day,” she says on Sunday from Melbourne. The Iranian Australian, who fled Iran’s theocratic regime almost 15 years ago, describes the news as a bittersweet but “big moment” for the country and its diaspora. “We’ve been waiting for this,” the 50-year-old says. Those sentiments were echoed across Australia’s Iranian community following the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after Israel and the US launched strikes on the country. In Sydney and Melbourne, planned anti-regime rallies on Sunday became celebrations of the leader’s death, with thousands attending. In Canberra, a few hundred people celebrated outside the now-closed Iranian embassy to cheer the death of the Ayatollah and praise Israeli and US leaders. Sign up: AU Breaking News email Champagne was sprayed over the dancing crowd, as people prayed for a liberated Iran and the safety of their families there. In Melbourne, members of Australia’s Iranian diaspora gathered in Federation Square and on the steps of parliament to celebrate after years of violence, most recently culminating in the regime’s brutal crackdown on protests, with up to 30,000 people estimated to have been killed. Suren Edgar, the vice president of the Australia Iranian Community Alliance (AICA), says hearing of Khamenei’s death was the “best morning of my life”. “He destroyed our country, our culture, killed our people and pushed the ideology of terror to other countries,” he says. Edgar, who migrated to Australia in 2014, says the community is hopeful after Israel and the US launched another attack on Iran after last year’s 12-day war. “It’s not easy to watch your country under that attack,” he says. “Missiles don’t understand who the enemy is and who are … ordinary people. So that’s why we are worried about our people. But on the other hand, we see them, they are happy, extremely happy.” The US-based organisation Human Rights Activists News Agency on Sunday reported at least 133 civilians had been killed, with 200 injured, in the first hours of the Israeli-US attack. Edgar says internet disruptions mean people in Australia are awaiting news from loved ones in Iran. “I’m still waiting to hear from some … the psychological impact of silence can be as distressing as the crisis itself,” he says. “Being unable to connect with loved ones online creates a unique kind of stress and helplessness.” Edgar says the diaspora community is celebrating Khamenei’s death, but remains unsure if there will be desired regime change. “As long as the Islamic Republic is in power, it’s not done,” he says on Sunday. Kambiz Razmara, the vice-president of the Australian-Iranian Society of Victoria, says there’s “quiet anticipation” in the Iranian Australian community. “Years of oppression are coming to a head, and so people see what’s likely to come about, or what could possibly happen after, and they’re choosing to celebrate that,” he says. Some in Australia fear retaliatory attacks by the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. Razmara says there is support for Reza Pahlavi – the exiled son of Iran’s former pro-western monarch. But he says some community members would only accept him as a transitional leader. Others hope Pahlavi will eventually head a constitutional monarchy. “During ‘woman, life, freedom’ [protests], there was no identifiable leadership. Now there is, and there seems to be a much greater motivation for … change to come,” Razmara says. “People have, in Reza Pahlavi, someone who can propose and offer some kind of transitional arrangement to democratic rule.” Iranian Australian Mohammad Hashemi accepts there’s uncertainty about what will happen in the coming weeks – but for now he is celebrating the death of the supreme leader. “We just feel happy,” the Sydney-based activist says. “This is one of the best [pieces of] news we’ve ever been waiting for.” Hashemi’s cousin, Majid Kazemi, was executed in May 2023 after participating in a “woman, life, freedom” protest in which three members of the security forces died. It was one of many demonstrations in response to the death in September 2022 of Mahsa Amini in police custody after being detained for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Hashemi says an Iranian solider present at his cousin’s execution told his family that Kazemi’s last words before his execution were “death to Khamenei”. “I know he would be dancing and celebrating this news. This is why he fought until his last minute.” - Additional reporting Australian Associated Press

An ugly year for the Louvre: where does the world’s biggest museum go from here?

Just over a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (if famously prickly) former head of the largest and most-visited museum in the world, wrote a somewhat alarming note to her boss, France’s culture minister. Des Cars, who on Tuesday resigned as president of the Louvre, lamented the advanced state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries. The Louvre was overcrowded, she said. Facilities were substandard, technologies hopelessly outdated. Water was coming through the ceilings. Violent temperature swings were damaging artworks. The museum had reached a “worrying level of obsolescence”. But she had the answer. Barely a week later, the first woman to run France’s most prized cultural institution stood beside Emmanuel Macron in front of its biggest draw, the Mona Lisa, as the French president proudly unveiled Louvre: New Renaissance, their radical, ambitious, €1bn plan for the museum’s renovation. Des Cars’ immediate future, and that of the Louvre, looked assured. Alas, the year ahead had other plans. Rolling staff strikes, a decade-long ticket scam, an avalanche of ageing infrastructure issues and – most glaringly – a daring daylight heist of €88m (£77m) of crown jewels intervened. No one doubts that the Louvre needs work. Spread across a sprawling 360,000 sq metre site, it is a city within a city. Originally a solid 12th-century fortress, it expanded into a gilded royal palace in the 16th century and, come the French Revolution, became a museum in 1793. Its multilayered architectural fabric contains more than 400 rooms and about 9 miles of corridors. It has 600,000-plus items in its collection, about 35,000 of which are on permanent display. It is the world’s largest museum. It was not designed for that purpose. In its current iteration, the Louvre is intended to handle about 4 million visitors annually. Last year, helped by star attractions including the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, it drew 9 million. Something, undeniably, had to be done. The question is what. And how far it should be dictated by the projection of state cultural power (and French presidential ego-polishing). Besides the necessary repairs and visitor improvements, des Cars’ project, enthusiastically backed by Macron, includes giving Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated portrait a room of its own, with independent access. That will entail excavating cavernous new exhibition spaces beneath the Cour Carrée, the museum’s eastern courtyard. The Louvre will also be graced with a “new grand entrance” at the Colonnade de Perrault, also on the museum’s eastern side. The project’s critics, who are many, call it pharaonic. The cost, estimated at more than €1.1bn, has drawn heavy criticism, from the state auditor and Louvre staff who feel the money could be far better spent. Experts question the true point. “It’s unnecessary, and it’s harmful,” said Didier Rykner, the editorial director of La Tribune de l’Art, an art news website. “But des Cars convinced Macron. He sees it as the kind of grand legacy project that French presidents love to leave behind them.” The Louvre’s last major refurb, in the 1980s, was commissioned by the late president François Mitterrand and included the striking glass pyramid, designed by the Chinese-American I M Pei, that serves as the museum’s current entrance. Previous leaders have given France such museum-monuments as the Pompidou Centre (Georges Pompidou), a new national library and an opera house (Mitterrand), and the Indigenous arts museum on the Quai Branly (Jacques Chirac). Macron has an affinity with the Louvre. He chose it as the backdrop for his presidential victory speech in 2017. But the fate of what the current president has come to see as his signature cultural legacy is starting to look a little less certain. Many in the French arts world openly believe that is why des Cars survived as long as she did: Macron, who leaves office next spring, did not fancy risking his flagship legacy project, despite the many and varied misfortunes that piled up. The museum’s decaying infrastructure saw two water pipes burst this month alone, including in the Denon wing, home to the Mona Lisa. In November, more than 300 documents in the Library of Egyptian Antiquities were soaked by another flood. The Campana gallery, famed for its Greek ceramics, closed late last year due to “structural weaknesses” in the beams supporting the floor above. Offices in another part of the Sully wing have been moved due to the risk of floor collapse. But since des Cars penned her resignation to the culture minister, Rachida Dati (who also left office this week to launch her attempt to be mayor of Paris), repair and maintenance issues have been the least of the museum’s worries. Morale is at an all-time low, with the Louvre’s 2,300 employees complaining of “untenable” conditions, severe understaffing and poor pay. Strikes have forced the museum to close, wholly or partially, more than a dozen times since last summer. “Staff feel like they are the last bastion before collapse,” employee unions said in a recent joint statement. Union spokespeople talk of a “catastrophic” situation, unbearable tensions and “absurd and irresponsible” management decisions. This month, police arrested nine people, including two museum employees and two guides, over a suspected ticket fraud scheme targeting Chinese tour groups that may, over the course of a decade, have cost the museum more than €10m (£8.7m). And most spectacularly of all, one Sunday in October, a gang of four broke into the museum’s Apollo gallery and made off with €88m (£77m) of diamond-studded Napoleonic jewellery in France’s most dramatic heist in decades. The gang used a stolen truck with an extendable ladder to reach the gallery’s entirely unsecured first-floor window, smashed display cases, grabbed the jewels, and fled on motorbikes in a seven-minute raid that made headlines around the world. Four men have been arrested and are under investigation, but investigators are no closer to recovering the jewels. Even with Macron’s support, it was inevitable that des Cars would eventually succumb to the cascade of reputational blows. “Quite clearly, here is a list of failings that, in many countries and many institutions, would have already led to her departure a long time ago,” said Alexandre Portier, the conservative chair of a parliamentary inquiry on museum security. After she resigned, des Cars said that while she accepted at least part of the blame for the obvious security failings that led to the heist, she felt she “may be paying the price today” for her “clear-sighted” earlier warnings and her proposed solution. She was proud of her work at the museum since 2021, she told Le Figaro, but had endured “an unprecedented media and political storm” and “staying the course is not enough. You need to move forward. And conditions for that are no longer in place.” After two years at Versailles, her successor, Christophe Leribault, now has one hell of a job. Leribault, 62, who previously ran the Musée d’Orsay, is admired for turning around the Petit Palais in Paris with innovative exhibitions that boosted visitor numbers. His task at the Louvre will be of a different – and politically loaded – order. The culture ministry says the priorities are to “strengthen the safety and security of the building, its collections and people”, restore trust and carry forward “necessary transformations”. Rykner is more specific. “He needs to get essential repairs done,” he said. “Calm down the staff unions, hire more people. That’s not easy. He needs some new heads of department. And he has to develop a coherent acquisitions policy. It’s a huge job.” Where “New Renaissance” fits into all that is unclear. The Louvre’s staff unions continue to denounce a “phantasmagorical” project they describe as “out of touch”, “incomprehensible” and “far removed from the reality and needs of the Louvre”. The Cour des Comptes, France’s state auditor, which has said security and repairs are “indispensable”, is equally scathing, describing the project as “a significant financial risk” and arguing the money should be spent on urgent repairs and upgrades. More tangibly, financing is not secure: the Louvre has said €200m to €300m will come from licensing fees from the museum’s Abu Dhabi franchise, with the remainder mainly from international donors – who, particularly in the US, appear highly reluctant. The timetable is strained. A shortlist of architects was meant to have been selected by April this year and the project launched by early 2027, before the presidential ballot at which Macron will step down. But that process was suspended in February. Between its Abu Dhabi funds, cash reserves, ticket revenues and state subsidies, according to Rykner, the Louvre has the money to carry out essential repairs, maintenance and a more modest modernisation. The rest risks despoiling France’s heritage. It was also, he said, unnecessary. “For sure, pressure on the Pyramid and the Denon wing has to be alleviated. The Mona Lisa has to move,” he said. “But three smaller additional entrances would be perfectly feasible – and there are other options for displaying the Mona Lisa.” The Louvre could also use the Grand Palais, renovated for the Olympics at a cost of more than €500m, for exhibition space, Rykner said. “New Renaissance is a pure vanity project,” he said. “Leribault should resist it until the president has gone.”

Sicily revokes century-old Mondello beach concession over mafia links

It is one of Europe’s most celebrated shorelines, framed by mountains and 19th-century villas and famed for its Caribbean-blue water and white sand. But Mondello beach in Palermo, Sicily, has also been mired in controversy, the subject of complaints stretching back a century from residents and tourists who say its private lidos, cabins and deckchairs have left scant room for public access. All that could change after Sicilian authorities revoked the permit of Italo Belga, the company that has controlled the beach for all that time, citing the risk of mafia infiltration into another firm subcontracted to carry out maintenance. Last year, an inquiry by the regional MP Ismaele La Vardera and reporting in La Repubblica newspaper revealed that individuals who worked for the subcontractor GM Edil had relatives who were members of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia that controls the Mondello area. La Vardera was subsequently given police protection. Italo Belga strongly denied having any dealings with mafia figures and its managers are not under investigation for mafia-related offences. The company said it was unaware that employees of its subcontractor had familial links to the mafia and that it has operated “in full compliance with the law”. It said in November that it had already cut ties with GM Edil after the prefect of Palermo, a representative of the interior ministry, flagged the risk of criminal infiltration. “In light of the anti-mafia interdiction order issued by the prefecture of Palermo against GM Edil, any relationship with the company in question, already suspended as a precautionary measure, has been definitively terminated, while we reserve the right to consider further action,” Italo Belga said in a statement at the time. In its revocation order on Thursday, Sicily’s regional department for territory and environment said that “while no specific concerns had emerged regarding Italo Belga’s senior management”, the company had outsourced maintenance work to a firm with “links to figures in organised crime”, which showed a “systematic willingness to employ individuals close to the mafia”. Italo Belga has said it is considering filing appeals against the order and bringing legal action in administrative tribunals. Speaking after the order, La Vardera said: “I am struggling to contain my emotion. After almost a year of battles and personal sacrifices, today we can finally write the word ‘end’. After more than 100 years, Italo-Belga no longer holds the concession for Mondello beach. This proves we were right to fight: today the rule of law prevails, along with that part of Sicily that says no to abuse of power. And Palermo wins too, because the beach is returned to its citizens.” The revocation order comes against a backdrop of growing complaints from Italians across the country about soaring prices charged by beach concession holders. For decades, renting the same cabin, sun bed and parasol each summer has been a ritual of Italian holiday culture. But last season opened with a marked drop in visitor numbers. Private beach resorts along Italy’s extensive coastlines reported declines of between 15% and 25% in June and July compared with the same period in 2024. Outside the quieter autumn and winter months, only small parts of Mondello beach remained open to the public, leaving beachgoers who were unwilling or unable to pay crowded at the edge of the sea. For now, the future of Mondello beach remains uncertain. The revocation will be examined by Palermo’s city council, which must decide whether to launch a new tender inviting other companies to manage the shoreline or to leave the beach entirely public.

Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says Russia peace talks will depend on situation in Middle East

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the time and place of the next round of peace talks between the US, Russia and Ukraine would depend on the security situation in the Middle East and the level of “real diplomatic possibilities”. The Ukrainian president on Saturday said he would issue new directives to Ukraine’s negotiating team at the talks, without detailing what they were. He had said the next round of talks would probably take place in Abu Dhabi in early March. But the United Arab Emirates has since been caught up in hostilities after the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran. Zelenskyy voiced his support for the US-led strikes, calling Iran “an accomplice of Putin” for supplying Shahed drones and the technology for Russia to produce them and other weapons in its war against Ukraine. He said it was important that Washington acted decisively, but also that hostilities did not escalate into a wider war. “It is only fair to give the Iranian people a chance to get rid of the terrorist regime, to get rid of it and guarantee the safety of all nations that have suffered from terror originating in Iran,” Zelenskyy said in a video address on social media. “It is important that the United States is determined. And whenever America is determined, global criminals weaken.” Zelenskyy said that Russia has used “more than 57,000 Shahed-type strike drones against Ukraine – against our people, against our cities, against our energy sector”. “Although Ukrainians have never threatened Iran, the Iranian regime chose to be Putin’s accomplice,” Zelensky said. Donald Trump is urging Moscow and Kyiv to strike an agreement to end Europe’s biggest war since 1945, though Zelenskyy has complained that his country is facing more pressure to make concessions. Ukraine is seeking iron-clad security guarantees which commit the US and its European allies to action if Russia attacks again after a peace deal is reached. The last round of peace talks, which took place in Geneva last week, did not achieve a breakthrough and was described as difficult by Kyiv and Moscow, although Washington said it saw “meaningful progress”. Zelenskyy’s chief of staff on Saturday said that Russia said at recent talks in Geneva that it would accept the US proposal for Ukraine’s postwar security guarantees. “At the last talks, the Russian side said for example that they would accept the security guarantees offered to Ukraine by the United States,” said Kyrylo Budanov in an interview aired on Ukrainian television. Budanov also said that at present Russia had not agreed to a summit between Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin, which had been floated earlier as a possibility by US special envoy Steve Witkoff. Russia on Saturday condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran as “a preplanned and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent UN member state”, demanding an immediate halt to the military campaign and a return to diplomacy. Russia has maintained a delicate balancing act in the Middle East for decades, trying to navigate its warm relations with Israel even as it has developed strong economic and military ties with Iran. Iranian forces and Russian sailors conducted annual drills in the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean last week aimed at “upgrading operational coordination as well as exchange of military experiences,” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported. Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a broad cooperation pact in January last year as their countries deepened their partnership in the face of stinging western sanctions. Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday its forces had taken control of the settlements of Neskuchne and Girke in Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Zaporizhizhia regions. And Ukraine’s Naftogaz said Russia struck a gas extraction facility in the Kharkiv region overnight, causing serious damage.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei obituary

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has died aged 86 in a large-scale air attack on the country by the US and Israel. He presided over a complex theocratic system that was enforced brutally at home, and sought to influence the exercise of power in other Middle Eastern countries. Though the US and Israel attempted to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme with a bombing campaign in June 2025, it was not fully successful. The economy continued to deteriorate, and the following January the country’s people took to the streets against the Islamic Republic. An estimated 30,000 or more protesters were killed – the largest death toll in modern Iranian history. US President Donald Trump considered discussions with Khameini’s diplomats about the nuclear issue and missile production to be too slow. In announcing the new attack, he called on Iranians to do what they could to take over the government once it was over. Khamenei had come to ultimate power in 1989, by which point he was already the country’s president. Iran’s 88-strong assembly of experts – senior Shia clerics – chose him to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrower of the Shah in 1979 and founder of the Islamic Republic, as supreme leader of Iran. Thereafter Khamenei had absolute power and the final say in Iran’s future, whether in regard to its controversial nuclear programme or detente with the west. He was not only commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces, which includes the regular artesh (army) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), but also headed the “axis of resistance” – an anti-western and anti-Israel alliance made up of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthi rebels eventually occupying western Yemen, and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Thus his rule had a direct impact on much of the region, and under his leadership the Islamic Republic of Iran became one of the world’s biggest state sponsors of terrorism. It remained a significant force even despite Hamas’s loss of strength as a result of Israel’s reprisals in response to the attack on 7 October 2023, Hezbollah’s setbacks after attacks by Israel in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in 2024. Nonetheless, much of Khamenei’s role would consist of protecting himself and his office from the dissatisfactions of the Iranian people and mis-steps of successive elected Iranian presidents. Mohammad Khatami (president from 1997 until 2005) led a reformist movement that resulted in a brief thawing of ties with the US, only to be overshadowed by student uprisings in 1999 that were crushed by security forces. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline presidency (2005-13) was marked by Holocaust denial on the international stage, the resumption of highly enriched uranium production as part of Iran’s nuclear programme and the most punitive multilateral sanctions regime the country had ever faced, and the fraudulent election that gave him a second term in 2009. Millions of dissatisfied Iranians took to the streets that June, held up signs asking “Where is my vote?”, wore green, and undertook acts of civil disobedience. Khamenei usually stayed out of politics, but he openly sided against this green movement, whose protests he saw as a velvet revolution backed by imperialist powers out to destroy and oust the Islamic Republic. Although they shared ideological views, Ahmadinejad would eventually fall out of favour with Khamenei. It was under Ahmadinejad that the IRGC increased its power and relevance in the Iranian economy. The IRGC, whose main role is to protect the Islamic Republic from internal and external threats, had been barred from politics by Khomeini, but Khamenei encouraged it to play a leading role, including in the Iranian economy and through its foreign arm, the Quds Force, in addition to serving as a security organisation that became integral to the exercise of repression. With Hassan Rouhani as president (2013-21), Iran temporarily came out of isolation. After years of negotiations with world powers, in 2015 it signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to curb its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. The deal would not have been possible without Khamenei’s signalling of “heroic flexibility” in 2013, just before Rouhani, on a trip to New York, attended his first UN general assembly and had a phone conversation with US president Barack Obama, the first top-level contact between the two countries since 1979. During Rouhani’s second term, Trump came to office and, after repeatedly threatening to withdraw from the JCPOA, he exited the multilateral agreement in May 2018. His administration then imposed a “maximum pressure” strategy that included the reimposition of unilateral sanctions, the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, and, the following year, an oil embargo that fuelled tensions in the Persian Gulf. However, Rouhani’s presidency was rocked by numerous mass protests, including those in 2019 known as Aban Khoonin (Bloody November), in which security forces killed 1,500 protesters under the cover of an internet blackout. In early 2020, the IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by the US while visiting Iraq, and just days later, a Ukrainian passenger airliner was downed by the IRGC, killing all 176 people on board. That year, Iran experienced the highest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths in the Middle East, with Khamenei held partly responsible after he barred the import of western vaccines. That year he also announced the second chapter of the Islamic revolution, called the Second Step initiative, which envisioned an Islamic Republic led by a pious and relatively young cohort carrying out his legacy. In February 2020, Iran’s Guardian council – a 12-member vetting body for which the supreme leader handpicks six members and which can veto candidates for election – followed this by disqualifying moderate candidates, and thus giving hardliners a majority in parliament. Similar action was taken in June 2021, in an engineered election that handed Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner, the presidency with a historically low election turnout. Many assumed Raisi would be Khamenei’s successor, and both of them became extremely unpopular. There was a similar outcome during the March 2024 parliamentary elections, but a surprise turn of events – a helicopter crash that May killed Raisi and the foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian – brought about a snap presidential election. The mass discontent on the ground is reportedly what prompted Khamenei, via the Guardian council, to allow a reformist candidate, Masoud Pezeshkian, to run. Pezeshkian was seen as a safe bet who would not challenge the nezam (ruling system). Many Iranians boycotted the polls, but Pezeshkian still won the presidency, and arguably this gave Khamenei some room to change course. Khamenei had always viewed the west as being bent on regime change in Iran, either through a velvet revolution, economic pressure via sanctions, or military intervention. Every decision that he made was in this context. In 2014, Khamenei had undergone surgery for his prostate. For well over a decade, he was widely thought to have prostate cancer. There were repeated rumours of his demise, notably in September 2022, after he cancelled a series of public appearances. Later that month, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman, in police custody for allegedly violating hijab rules, gave rise to mass anti-regime protests in all 31 of Iran’s provinces that were at the time the biggest threat to Khamenei’s rule in more than three decades. The situation drew international condemnation – also caused in part by Tehran arming Russia in its war in Ukraine. What became known as the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising appeared to briefly quieten down after the execution of four protesters, the deaths of more than 500 people, and stories of rape and torture trickling out of prisons holding the more than 60,000 people arrested during the unrest. In 2023 Khamenei granted limited amnesty allegedly to “tens of thousands” of prisoners – a move that human rights organisations suggested was a public relations stunt to clear him of accusations of gross human rights violations. The following year, a UN fact-finding mission found that crimes against humanity had been committed during the uprising. Khamenei amassed control of bonyads (charitable foundations) worth tens of billions of US dollars, and under his rule Iran was marred by systemic corruption, mismanagement and rising repression. At home there was deeply felt anger and resentment towards him and the clerical establishment. Hiis position was strengthened by re-establishing ties with Saudi Arabia, and other Arab neighbours in the Persian Gulf, and joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Brics intergovernmental groups. He gained support from China through a 25-year cooperation deal and from Russia through a defence and cooperation treaty that armed Moscow with drones and reportedly ballistic missiles to use in its Ukraine war. Still, Israel’s normalisation with some Arab states through the Abraham accords appeared threatening to the resistance axis, and it is no surprise that Khamenei backed the 7 October attack on Israel. Iran’s tit-for-tat strikes with Israel and the assassinations of Hamas leadership in Tehran and the Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah prompted speculation that Khamenei would be next. Khamenei attempted to prove himself defiant and willing to be martyred when he made a rare appearance on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack with a rifle in his hand to deliver a speech in which he called the attack on Israel a “logical, just and internationally legal action”. That posturing proved to be short-lived when a rebel offensive ousted the Assad regime in Syria, which the IRGC and its proxies had helped prop up for more than a decade, in December 2024. At the start of the following year, the Trump administration returned to office, with a renewed “maximum pressure” strategy. That April, the US and Iran entered talks over its nuclear programme, but little progress was made. On 12 June, just three days before another round of negotiations in Oman, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, triggering what became known as the 12-day war. The Israeli attack on military top brass and Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure was followed by a US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, causing severely damage. Despite Trump declaring the nuclear program “obliterated”, he continued to signal openness to renewed negotiations after he forced a ceasefire on 24 June. In late December that year, protests sparked by the collapse of the Iranian rial against the US dollar rapidly evolved into nationwide anti-regime protests, posint yet another threat to Khamenei’s three-decade rule. One of the potential figures around whom opposition might focus was Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed shah. On 8 January 2026, a communications shutdown ensued after Khamenei issued kill orders on protesters, and an unprecedented massacre followed. Born in the holy north-eastern Iranian city of Mashhad, Ali was the second of eight children of Khadijeh Mirdamadi and her husband Javad Khamenei, an Islamic scholar. The family depended on the charity of others, sometimes having nothing to eat but “bread with some raisins”. When Khamenei was 13, in 1952, the militant cleric Navvab Safavi spoke at his Islamic school and delivered a fiery speech against the monarchy. In Khamenei’s words, “the very first sparks of consciousness concerning Islamic, revolutionary ideas, and the duty to fight the shah’s despotism and his British supporters, were kindled” in him. From 1958 to 1964, Khamenei did his religious studies at the Hojjatie school at the seminary in Qom, the centre of Islam in Iran, where he came under the tutelage of Khomeini and in 1962 joined the clerical movement against the shah. Khamenei’s worldview was shaped by the events of his youth, including the MI6-backed CIA coup d’etat against the prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. His pro-Palestine leanings were largely prompted by Khamenei’s readings of the Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb, which he had translated to Persian. The notion of gharbzadegi (“westoxification”), espoused by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, shaped his ideas of the west and its imperialist hold over Iran. Naturally, Khamenei and those likeminded clerics at the time saw Islam as a “cultural and ideological weapon” against it. Despite this stance, Khamenei was an avid reader of western literature – including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Grapes of Wrath, and even the writings of Leo Tolstoy. But the story that spoke to him the most was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which Khamenei once described as “miraculous” and a “book of wisdom”. He enjoyed other literary works, including Persian poetry, having grown up with his mother quoting the poet Hafez. From 1963 onwards, Khamenei’s views and outspokenness against the shah would get him imprisoned several times by the notorious secret police – the Savak – which the CIA and the Israeli Mossad had trained. The torture and isolation he reportedly underwent in the Qasr jail, since turned into a museum, had a deep impact on him, as recounted in his memoir, Cell No 14. Khamenei continued to be a close adherent of Khomeini for the next 16 years despite his exile abroad. When Khomeini returned from exile in France in February 1979, after the two years of protests that ousted the shah, Khamenei was part of the revolutionary council. By then he was wearing many turbans, including those of Friday prayer leader in Tehran and deputy defence minister, and he would later play a role in organising the military during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. The conflict increased his distrust of the west, given its material support of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and ignoring the use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. In 1981, Khamenei survived an assassination attempt that paralysed his right hand. He said: “I won’t need the hand. It would suffice if my brain and tongue work.” He served as president of the Islamic Republic for two terms (1981-89). In 1987 he made his only trip to the US, to address the UN general assembly. Months before Khomeini’s death from a heart attack in 1989, Khamenei reportedly said: “I’m not qualified to be supreme leader. It’s not the proper place for me.” When Khomeini died, the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani pushed the uncharismatic, underqualified and reluctant Khamenei – not at that point having achieved the senior clerical rank of ayatollah – forward. Despite his initial diffidence, Khamenei the supreme leader came to resemble Big Brother, in that his visage was seen everywhere – complete with wide-rimmed glasses, white beard and the black turban that indicates a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Even though the majority of his support, and that for the Islamic Republic, waned over the years, with anti-regime sentiment commonplace, he still had followers who continued to participate in pro-government rallies and in engineered elections to maintain the clerical establishment. In 1965 Khamenei married Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, and they had six children. • Ali Hosseini Khamenei, cleric and political leader, born 19 April 1939; died 28 February 2026

‘The most bitter news’: Iran reels as more than 100 children reportedly killed in school bombing

Iran’s parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates, as bombs began to fall across the country in a joint US-Israel attack. At one elementary school, according to Iran’s state-controlled media, they arrived to find devastation. At least 100 children had been killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, the Mizan news agency reported, with dozens more unaccounted for. In one video circulating on social media, purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the strike, smoke rises from the burnt-out walls, and debris lies spread across the road. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the site, some in obvious distress. Screams can be heard in the background. The report of the bombing, its death toll and the video’s source could not immediately be independently verified by the Guardian. Persian factchecking service Factnameh was able to cross-reference the video with other photographs of the school site, and concluded that the video was authentic. Reuters said it had also verified the footage as being from the school. Hossein Kermanpour, spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry, said in a post to X that the bombing of the school was “the most bitter news” of the conflict so far. “God knows how many more children’s bodies they will pull from under the rubble.” The school appears to be adjacent to a Revolutionary Guards barracks. If the death toll is confirmed, the school bombing would be the largest mass casualty event of the US-led attack so far. Across the country, Iranians said they were feeling a mixture of terror and hope as the bombings continued. Some expressed relief that the long-expected strikes had arrived, and opponents of the regime spoke of hope that they might lead to political change – but both were tempered by fear that the attacks would bring more civilian deaths to a country already reeling from recent bloodshed. In Tehran, some people sheltered in their homes, while others rushed through gridlocked traffic to find their children as schools shut down. Many said they had been preparing for weeks for a possible war, stockpiling water and supplies. Amir*, 37, owner of a bakery in Tehran, said he was “relieved” to hear that strikes appeared to have hit government buildings, but feared there would be collateral damage. “My worry is that innocent people will be killed,” he said. Amir had family members injured in the Iranian regime’s recent crackdown on nationwide protests, and feared there was more bloodshed to come. “We have endured so much grief – despite that, we don’t want to see the body bags on the streets due to US and Israeli strikes,” he said. The attacks came in the middle of diplomatic negotiations between Iran and the US, about seven weeks after Tehran violently crushed nationwide anti-regime demonstrations, with government forces opening fire on unarmed protesters. According to the US-based Human Rights Activist news agency (HRANA), which has been documenting casualties, more than 7,000 people have been confirmed dead in the protests, with more than 11,000 deaths still under investigation. Some, who had lost friends or family members in the protests, were defiant: Mohsen, 25, an IT worker in Tehran, said: “We do fear that compatriots will be killed [by the US/Israeli strikes], but I have witnessed friends gunned down by the regime – like thousands of us have. “I don’t really know what we are going to witness. But thanks to the regime and its killing machine, we have already seen what a war zone feels like.” Moein*, 21, a student at the University of Tehran, said he could hear loud bangs from near the university as the bombs struck. He was involved in the recent protests and had two friends killed in the crackdown. He said: “We were not in favour of foreign intervention, because we did not want our loved ones to be killed, but the regime has massacred our families anyway. When weapons come from the US, do they strike us more gently than when they come from the regime’s killing machines?” Moein said that while the city felt apprehensive, it had not plunged into panic. “We have been preparing for war so we have stocked up on essentials,” he said. “As far as I know there are no bomb shelters for us ordinary people.” He and others on the ground said they had been intermittently unable to access state media – although it was not clear whether this was due to cyber-attacks or websites being overwhelmed by traffic. The war was launched by the US and Israel on Saturday morning, with Donald Trump announcing that he was beginning “major combat operations” against Iran, and urging Iranians to rise up and “take over your government”. The US had built up a significant military presence in the region over recent weeks in preparation for an attack. “I wasn’t surprised because we were expecting an attack for weeks,” said Mehnaz*, 27, based in Tehran. She was having breakfast when she heard loud explosions about 9am. “We live close to the presidential office and the administrative headquarters of the leader of the government,” she said. The first sets of strikes appeared to hit close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s offices and compound. Mehnaz said there were mixed feelings, particularly among opponents of the current government. “It’s a strange feeling,” she said. “Both fear and hope for the end of the regime.” * Names have been changed

‘This is round two’: attacks on Iran have broad support among unsurprised Israelis

Air raid sirens emptied Israel’s streets on Saturday and filled its bomb shelters, as the country braced for waves of Iranian attacks. But individual fear and resignation did not temper broad political and popular support for the country’s second regional war in less than a year. “We all of us feel that what we started needs to be finished,” said Gal Tzairi, a 23-year-old university student sheltering in an underground car park in central Tel Aviv. “We want our safety, so we know we need [this].” Paramedics had to dig Tzairi out from the rubble of his home last June, when an Iranian missile strike brought down his apartment building. The first sirens brought back some of his fear from that day, but like many in Israel he said he had been half-expecting another war, after weeks of US military buildup in the region and Israeli prime minister’s warnings to Iran. “This is round two,” said 30-year-old Tom Zimako, who backed “100%” the decision to attack Iran again. “We need to find a good solution against terror – not against people, against the citizens [of Iran].” The morning attacks immediately halted bitter Israeli political feuding ahead of elections due by October this year. Disputes over conscription of ultra-Orthodox men and whether to hold a state inquiry into the 7 October 2023 attacks were set aside, as opposition leaders across most of the political spectrum united behind Netanyahu. Yair Lapid, the official leader of the opposition, said in a social media post: “I fully support this operation. We all agree about the justification and importance of striking the murderous Iranian regime.” Yair Golan, head of the centre-left Democrats, said the Israeli military had his “full backing” in “removing the Iranian threat”. Rightwing Naftali Bennett said “the entire nation of Israel stands behind you”. As European and regional powers urged a return to negotiations to tackle Iran’s nuclear programme, prominent Israelis were calling for a broad, open-ended war. Yoav Gallant, a former defence minister, said in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12: “It’s clear we have the upper hand regarding Iran. The important thing is we don’t stop until we finish the job.” Dismissing Iran’s response to Israeli and US strikes, he added: “The small amount of rockets Iranians are shooting shows they are weak.” One of the few political critics of the war was lawmaker Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who attacked the opposition for falling in line behind a government that wants to “live by the sword forever”. “There is no opposition in Israel, only 50 shades of militarism,” he said on social media. “Time and again, they try the same formula here: another ‘round’, another operation, more blood. Every time they promise that this time it will bring security, and every time reality proves otherwise.” Missile attacks on Israel are particularly dangerous for the country’s Palestinian citizens, who have less access to bomb shelters. Nourka Ghoul, a 30-year-old art director from East Jerusalem, is among those who don’t have a shelter at home. She had bundled her husband, Kenan, and 13-month-old daughter Sofia into the car to head for a relative’s apartment. “When the sirens sound, we come together and pray,” she said. “It is always the same each time. We want to be with our family. If we are going to die, we will die all in one go.” For many in Israel, the disruptions of war are part of their daily routine. Aleeza, 35, a film-maker struggling to entertain a baby and a toddler in a shelter, said her three-year-old now plays “sirens” with friends, racing each other to “shelters” in their playground. She was more frustrated than frightened on Saturday afternoon, because the war had abruptly halted filming of her first feature, a comedy. “I just want it to be over.” The attack came on the eve of the Jewish festival of Purim, which commemorates the biblical story told in the book of Esther of how a Jewish community in the ancient Persian empire saved themselves from a massacre. Traditionally celebrations include dressing up, and some people in Tel Aviv went straight from early Purim parties to shelters still in costume. Others joked that the US president, Donald Trump, wanted to cast himself as a modern-day Mordechai – a hero in the biblical story – by defending Jewish lives in modern-day Iran. With the airspace closed and all flights cancelled, some tourists had to find their way to shelters as well. Philippe and Juliette Kubler, from Nice, France, had been visiting Jerusalem on a long-planned trip of a lifetime. “We said to ourselves that there was a small risk. We had a super time here. Everyone was very welcoming. We saw all the sacred sites. We never felt in any danger,” said Philippe, a hospital nurse. “Now I’m just worrying about how we get home.”

The rise and fall of Iran’s ruthless and pragmatic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

When he appeared in public for the first time in five years in October 2024, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had an uncompromising message: Israel “won’t last long”, he told tens of thousands of supporters at a mosque in Tehran in a Friday sermon. “We must stand up against the enemy while strengthening our unwavering faith,” the then-84-year-old told the gathering. Seventeen months later, Khamenei faced his final climactic confrontation after decades of bitter struggle against multiple enemies. Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that there were many signs indicating Khamenei “is no longer with us”, without explicitly confirming his death. Hours later, after Donald Trump also claimed Khamenei had been killed, it was confirmed by Iranian state media. It is very clear that the supreme leader was in the crosshairs from the earliest moments of Saturday’s strikes, with satellite imagery showing that his secure compound was heavily damaged in the initial barrage. Certainly, Israel and the US have made little secret of their keen desire to eliminate Khamenei and so trigger the downfall of the Islamic Republic of Iran in its present form. Back in October 2024, Khamenei already appeared to have his back to a wall. Days before, Israel had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran secretary general of Hezbollah, with huge bombs dropped on the militant Islamist movement’s headquarters in Beirut. The assassination was a personal blow to Khamenei, who had known Nasrallah for decades. The Israeli air offensive against Iran in June last year was another such blow, revealing the weakness of both Iran’s air defences and the coalition of Islamist militias that Khamenei had built up to deter Israel. The Iranian barrage of missiles and drones launched at Israel inflicted some damage but far from enough to stop Israeli attacks. The war ended after Donald Trump dispatched US bombers to strike Iranian nuclear sites, a grave setback to a programme that Iran’s supreme leader had cherished. That brief conflict revealed that Khamenei had few good options left - a situation this careful, pragmatic, conservative and ruthless revolutionary always sought to avoid. Born the son of a minor cleric of modest means in the eastern Iranian shrine city of Mashhad, Khamenei took his first steps as a radical in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1960s. The then-shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had launched a major reform project largely rejected by the country’s conservative clergy. As a young religious student in Qom, a centre of theology, Khamenei had soaked in the traditions of Shia Islam and the radical new thinking of the emerging leader of the conservative opposition, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By the late 1960s, Khamenei was running secret missions for Khomeini, who had been exiled, and organising networks of Islamist activism. Khamenei soaked up other influences, too. Though an avowed aficionado of western literature, particularly Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck, the young activist was steeped in the anti-colonial ideologies of the time and the anti-western sentiment that often went with them. He met thinkers who sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create new ideologies, liked works describing the “westoxification” of his country and translated works by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who would inspire generations of Islamist extremists, into Farsi. Imprisoned repeatedly by Iran’s feared security services, Khamenei was nonetheless able to take part in the vast protests of 1978 that eventually convinced the shah to flee and allowed Khomeini to return. A protege of the implacable cleric, he swiftly rose up the hierarchy of the radical regime that seized power, and by 1981, after surviving an assassination attempt that deprived him of the use of an arm, he had won election to the largely ceremonial post of president. When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was selected as his successor, once the constitution changed to allow someone of lesser clerical qualifications to take on the role and with much greater powers than before. Khamenei swiftly deployed these to consolidate his control over the sprawling and fragmented apparatus of Iran’s post-revolutionary state. One key power base was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the beating activist heart of the new regime and a powerful military, social and economic force. But Khamenei, as ever, was careful to find other powerful allies and clients, too. Through the 1990s, he further strengthened his grip, eliminating opponents and rewarding those loyal to him. Even poets Khamenei had once professed to admire were targeted by security services. Overseas dissidents were hunted down, and the relationship with Hezbollah, which the IRGC had helped found in the aftermath of the revolution, was reinforced. At all times, he followed his strategy of pragmatically advancing the inflexible principles of the project bequeathed him by his late mentor. When in 1997, Mohammad Khatami, a reformist candidate, won the presidency in a landslide, Khamenei allowed him some freedom of action but worked hard and often forcefully to protect the core of the regime and its ideology from any serious challenge. Khamenei did not, however, stop Khatami reaching out to Washington in an ultimately abortive effort to establish better relations in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and, following Khomenei’s example, forswore weapons of mass destruction. But he also backed the IRGC’s efforts to bleed US forces in Iraq after their 2003 invasion and extend Iranian influence in the neighbouring country. This marked the further extension of his strategy of relying on proxies to project power across the region and deter and threaten Israel, named “Little Satan” by the revolutionaries in 1979, with the “Great Satan” being the US. Khamenei was sceptical of the nuclear deal painstakingly negotiated by Iranian officials with the US and others, but he did not oppose its implementation in 2015. Analysts argue over whether he has sought to restrain or encourage hardliners in the IRGC who have pushed for Iran to acquire a bomb. Successive waves of unrest and reform efforts were met with surges of vicious repression alongside continuing harsh treatment of measures targeting women, gay people and religious minorities. This, along with deteriorating economic circumstances, disillusioned many erstwhile supporters of the regime and broadened existing unrest. A pressure cooker of discontent was building. Overseas, Khamenei chose to invest heavily in the so-called axis of resistance – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen and a motley assortment of Islamic militant militias in Syria and Iraq. This may have seemed a clever tactic but it collapsed under the weight of Israeli attacks following the outbreak of war in Gaza, while Iran’s historic alliance with Damascus was ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December. On Saturday, as US and Israeli jets and missiles pounded Iran, striking Khamenei’s offices and perhaps killing him, Hezbollah’s new leadership offered rhetorical support to Iran, but nothing else. There is little Hamas can do to help, and the Houthis seem frozen. Thus weakened, Khamenei has spent the last months facing spiralling crisis. During his more than three decades in power, Khamenei sought to navigate the pressures of conflicting forces within Iran, to avoid outright war and to preserve Khomeini’s legacy – as well as his own power and that of his immediate loyalists, of course. On the international scene, it is possible to detect evidence of some remaining pragmatism. Faced with the huge military power of the US and Donald Trump’s demands for massive concessions that would strip away the last defences of his regime, Iran’s supreme leader played for time, offering at least some concessions to forestall immediate attack. Domestically, it was the hardline ideologue, not the master tactician, who took centre stage as he sent police and paramilitary thugs to bloodily crush the biggest wave of internal protest and unrest since the 1979 revolution that set him on his way to power. In the run-up to the US and Israeli attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessed that even if Iran’s supreme leader were killed in the operation, he would probably be replaced by hardline figures from the IRGC, the most powerful military force within the country and the most ideologically committed to continuing what they consider the values and project of the 1979 revolution, two sources told Reuters last week. For a long time, Khamenei has been ailing, prompting feverish speculation over a successor. The end of his long career has made his many failings and many challenges manifest. It looks now that Khamenei’s brutal balancing is over.