Ali Khamenei was born in 1939 in the Northeastern city of Mashhad in Iran in a family of religious scholars and was getting involved in the clerical opposition movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1962.
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Khamenei received his initial position in the ministry of defense as deputy minister and helped to initiate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which was one of the foundations of the Iranian military and political system, after the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Khamenei was appointed as the new supreme leader by the Assembly of Experts, another powerful body of high-ranking clerics, after the death of Khomeini in June 1989.
The constitution was changed to allow him to be appointed even though he did not have the traditional topmost position among the Shia clerics.
Thereafter Ayatollah Khamenei has exercised firm control over political system and armed forces in Iran, securing stability of the ruling formation and resistance to internal opposition, even by using forceful means.
He was a hardliner on the issue of foreign policy especially concerning the United States, which he regarded with a lot of distrust. He also repeated several times his pronunciations against the presence of the State of Israel, and had at times questioned historical events that were generally agreed upon like the Holocaust.
During his leadership, the country of Iran has had seven different presidential leadership and Khamenei himself has six children. His extended reign has had significant impacts on the political, religious and military institutions of the country.
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