Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader who ruled Iran with unwavering brutality for 36 years, is dead. You can see the giddy shock on people’s faces, as they rush spontaneously into the streets of Iranian towns and cities in some of the clips that have made it to social media.
There are eruptions of joyous dancing, sweets offered to strangers, chanting and cheering and singing – all as the United States and Israel rain down bombs on a country which, despite Khamenei’s demise, remains for now in the grip of mass-murdering theocracy.
There are reports of civilian casualties, including at a girls’ school in Hormozgan province. Despite decades spent diverting billions to fund terrorist proxies, ballistic missile and nuclear programs, the Islamic Republic had not built a single bomb shelter for its long-suffering civilian population. That everyday Iranians would risk taking to the streets to celebrate the death of their own leader during a time of active war speaks volumes. These are a desperate people, many for whom war had come to offer a more hopeful future than the absence of it.
Some of the political activists in one of the Iranian prisons I was held in used to say that they wished Trump would come and bomb Iran.
I initially assumed they were joking – who in their right mind would welcome a foreign adversary waging war on their country? Particularly in light of the many devastating unintended consequences of US interventions in other parts of the Middle East – both Iraq and Afghanistan are after all, right next door.
Iranians are still scarred by the painful memory of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, which saw Iranian cities targeted with chemical weapons and decimated an entire generation of young men, who died at the front in their hundreds of thousands.
Yet, many inside Iran still welcomed the American bombs.
Iranians are not naive about the geopolitical realities of the region. But they are exhausted, and they are desperate. The massacre carried out on Khamenei’s orders in January this year profoundly impacted the internal opposition’s calculus. In a few days the Islamic Republic, by turning military grade weapons on unarmed, peaceful civilian protesters, conducted one of the biggest single mass killings in history. Not in Iranian history, but in history anywhere.
The people are still counting their dead, and burials and mourning rites continue. The hopeful mood of the heady days of the 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests, in which it was thought that peaceful civil disobedience and mass rallies might eventually bring down the regime, died along with the tens of thousands who had similarly taken to the streets in January’s protests.
What was left was a profound trauma and a sense of desperation. Desperation so deep that many welcomed Trump’s decision to once again bomb their country, despite the dangers inherent. As one activist friend so aptly put it, paraphrasing George Orwell: “when war feels like the lesser evil know it is because greater evils have been allowed to endure for so long.”
The Iranian people celebrate because Khamenei’s death feels like a circuit breaker. They have exhausted every peaceful route for removing the oppressor who has sat on their necks for almost half a century, not only murdering and torturing and raping, but controlling their lives in granular detail – down to whether they are allowed to wear shorts, hold hands in the street, play sports, eat and drink what they like, marry who they like.
Funeral rites, child custody, the inheritance of property, permission to leave the country – everything is controlled by a regime whose instincts are deeply totalitarian.
For now, in the immediate moment, Khamenei’s death is an opportunity to breathe. For the first time in decades Iran’s oppressed civilian population can take some air into its battered lungs and start to develop actual hope for better days ahead.
The decapitation of the regime does not mean the end of the Islamic Republic – whether Trump intends to stay the course, and whether regime change is even possible through air strikes alone,
remains to be seen.
Dangerous as this moment is, Khamenei’s death will be a turning point in the history of Iran, in which a window of possibility has been opened to imagine a different future.
Ali Khamenei lived by the mantra “Death to America” but he really brought death and destruction upon his own country, Iran. No matter your thoughts on this war, its justifications and its manner of conduct, we should allow the Iranian people this one moment to celebrate.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow in Security Studies at Macquarie University and a regular columnist. She is the author of The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.
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Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow in Security Studies at Macquarie University and a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. She is the author of The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.
