Khamenei is dead — and Iranians dare to hope for freedom again after decades of tyranny
"Khamenei is dead?" That was the first sentence at the top of every message I received as Operation Epic Fury unfolded. The question mark at the end baffled me; Israel had already announced that it had verified the body in the rubble of the missile attack to be that of Ayatollah Khamenei.
Even more confusing was that the question persisted even as mainstream news sites splashed the words "Khamenei is dead" across their screens.
Then it dawned on me that this was no longer a question. It was disbelief, compounded by a rare combination of mourning and celebration. It was a look into the surreal world in which Iranians had come to live, as if anything that happened in Iran was like sleepwalking into someone else’s nightmare.
And then there was a flood of messages filled with exclamation marks and fireworks emojis. The mood shifted from disbelief to jubilation. Iranians were dancing in the streets, honking their car horns and chanting "Freedom! FREEDOM!"
They had not envisioned this moment arriving so early, only a few hours into Operation Epic Fury, and so precisely targeted that all the buildings surrounding Khamenei’s compound remained standing.
The longest-running dictator of the modern era, who had managed a façade of invincibility for himself and disposability for his opponents, was dead. His era of denying Iranians a sense of normalcy — of life lived without one’s own choices — had come to an end.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 had abruptly upended normalcy, veiling women, banning bars and movie theaters, separating genders and gradually transforming public spaces into glorified cemeteries, with pictures of Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) "martyrs" looming large.
For those of us with fond childhood memories of parks with flowerbeds and fountains, and men selling toys and balloons from pushcarts, nothing looked like the Iran we knew. The Iran we loved changed slowly, and then quickly, from a modern, forward-looking country to a scene out of an Islamic "Mad Max."
But as recent uprisings have shown, Iranians are resilient and creative. "They are like wheat in a field," Rolof Benny, a celebrated photographer touring Iran to capture its beauty, told my parents. "They bend their heads with the coming storm and stand right back up."
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Life was not as seamless as Benny had observed. But he was right that Iran is unique. Longing for normalcy, Iranians began to quietly rebel, naming their baby boys Shahan — a Persian-origin name meaning kings — instead of the regime-sanctioned Mohammad. They created movies that won awards in international competitions.
Careful not to raise the ire of the regime’s morality council, they embedded their anger in plotlines depicting the regime’s tyranny through stories of divorce and the dissolution of families, the anguish of a rebellious child, or a father dying of Alzheimer’s who forgets the unbearable present and lives in the past.
Normalcy was also the call in the song "Baraye" ("For the Sake Of") by Shervin Hajipour. Popularized during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Hajipour sang of towering trees lining Tehran’s famed Pahlavi Avenue, barking dogs and idle days spent drowning in one’s beloved’s eyes. Hajipour won a Grammy in 2023 in the Best Song for Social Change category.
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It is almost too easy — and perhaps too early — to conclude that the mullahs were the authors of their own demise.
But for a government anchored in the teachings of the Quran, the regime was blatantly immoral and unspeakably ruthless, butchering Iranians in the streets or in the isolation of prison wards. Many who were detained were never seen again. Many who were released were ghosts of their former selves.
Perhaps the bigger offense to proud Iranians was the clerics’ claims to nationalism, as they often wove Iran’s beloved poetry into their hateful sermons. Nationalism is Iran’s most enduring ideology, and Iranians ridicule any pretense by the clerics with gusto.
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"They don’t represent me or my people," I would often hear in interviews with Iranians. "There is nothing Persian about the Ayatollahs." In the aftermath of the 12-day war, they insisted they would not rally around the flag "because this is not our flag."
Just as the Islamic regime’s flag replaced the ancient Lion and Sun, the rule of the clerics was a construct from the start. In fact, it had no precedent in Islamic history. "We did not create a revolution to worry about the price of tomatoes," Khomeini would angrily retort to those who came to kiss his robe and ask mundane questions about running the country. "Islam is the answer. It has everything."
Ironically, Iranians’ rejection of Khomeini’s Islam has brought two ancient peoples together. My sources in Iran speak of a growing bond between Iranian Jews and crowds of protesters. "Ma hameh ba ham hasteem" ("We are all in this together") is now chanted while Israeli flags wave alongside the Lion and Sun flag across Europe and the U.S. In this, history has come full circle from Cyrus the Great to the present.
A return to normalcy may not be far behind.