Caroline Hawley

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had the final say on all important matters of state in Iran.

He served as president of the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran's theocratic state.

When he died in 1989, Ali Khamenei took over as supreme leader.

He'd grown up in the holy city of Mashhad and became a cleric at a young age, though not one of huge consequence.

And historian Ali Ansari says that at first he wasn't a hardliner.

As supreme leader, he'd had to build his power base by aligning himself with Iran's hardline military force, the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards.

The regime's repression alienated more and more Iranians.

Elected presidents who'd promised political reform were repeatedly thwarted by the supreme leader, and protests against the regime, when they broke out, were brutally crushed.

In 2009 came the first major challenge to his rule.

There were mass demonstrations in response to a presidential election that many Iranians felt was stolen by the system in favour of a conservative candidate.

The regime responded with deadly force.

Then in 2022 came an uprising led by women, chanting woman, life, freedom.

It began after the death and custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amin, who'd been arrested and accused of not wearing her hijab properly.

But protesters of all ages were demanding change, challenging as never before the very legitimacy of clerical rule.

They chanted, death to the dictator, a reference to Ali Khamenei, as they did again during an uprising in January that was put down with unprecedented force, only engendering more hatred of him.

He was committed to the end to preserving the central tenets of the Islamic Republic.

He blamed the unrest, as he always did, on outsiders, Iran's enemies, Israel and the US.

Within the Middle East, he tried to project power and influence by sponsoring a network of proxy groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, who were meant to help deter Israel from attacking.

But the so-called Axis of Resistance crumbled under Israeli attack in the wake of the Hamas assault of October 7, 2023.

But it was Iran's nuclear program that provoked the biggest crisis of his rule.