Protesters hold portraits of Iran's late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a solidarity protest outside the U.S. Consulate in Durban on March 3.RAJESH JANTILAL/AFP/Getty Images
Samira Mohyeddin is a Toronto-based journalist.
On Saturday, a report reverberated around the world: Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, had been killed by Israeli and U.S. missile strikes.
Upon the announcement of his death, jubilation rang out not only in the streets and homes of people in Iran, but also in countries to which Iranians have fled, including Canada. For many of them, this is not a time of complicated mourning. Ayatollah Khamenei presided over a deeply authoritarian state.
But the euphoria of seeing a tyrant toppled is slowly dying with every continued air strike on Iran. What’s more, his elimination by foreign hands risks reshaping his legacy: The U.S. and Israel made a martyr out of the Ayatollah, and in the Islamic Republic, martyrdom can be more powerful than survival.
Now, there is sorrow – not for the man himself, but for the justice and accountability that never arrived. History may record the architects of repression, but history is not a courtroom. The mothers who buried their children, the prisoners who lost years to solitary confinement, the journalists forced into exile – they deserved more than the swift bombs of Israel and the United States.
As cautionary tales through history show, removing a figurehead does not dissolve or dismantle institutions. As Iran’s second Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei presided over a system that tightened its grip at every sign of opposition, and answered demands for reform with batons and bullets. He treated women’s fight for autonomy as an existential threat rather than a movement for civil rights. He was the embodiment of theocracy’s cruelty, the perennial “guardian” of a state that tolerated no dissent.
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But the Islamic Republic is not built on one man alone. It is built on networks of clerical authority, military power and economic patronage. Those structures endure, and are now operating with fewer internal constraints. Succession struggles could unfold behind closed doors, but publicly the system has every incentive to project unity and resolve.
The Islamic Republic has long anchored its legitimacy in the language of defiance. Since 1979, the state has portrayed itself as standing against Western interference and Israeli hostility. That narrative has, at times, rung hollow for Iranians demanding accountability and reform. But a direct strike on the country’s highest authority hands Iran’s rulers an unambiguous story: Iran as a whole is under siege.
On Saturday, Donald Trump took to the airwaves and told Iranians: “Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take; this will be probably your only chance for generations.” Three days have passed since Mr. Trump’s statement, however, and there have been no protests and no takeovers. How can Iranians shape their destiny, when they are scrambling for survival amid 2,000-pound bombs?
Contrary to Mr. Trump’s overt call to action, Iran’s internal opposition has been strikingly organic over the past few years. After the death of Mahsa Amini, women and young people led sustained protests that challenged the moral and political foundations of rule by the clergy. Workers’ strikes and student demonstrations signalled deep economic and generational frustration. These movements were difficult for Tehran to dismiss as mere foreign plots because their grievances were unmistakably domestic.
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But in moments like these, feelings of nationalism can eclipse dissent. The attack may allow the regime to dismiss this revolution as one fuelled by outsiders.
For Canada, which is home to one of the world’s largest Iranian diasporas, these developments hit close to home. Families are divided between relief at the end of a repressive era and dread about the bombs that are killing ordinary Iranians. What was proposed as a strategic advancement may instead produce blowback, with the martyrdom of Iran’s Supreme Leader only serving to inflame the very forces the operation sought to contain. If the result is a more unified, more militarized and more aggrieved Iran, then what was presented as a decisive blow may prove dangerously short-sighted. Far from weakening the system, continued strikes could entrench it.
Mr. Trump told reporters that the war in Iran could last four to five weeks. But a people floundering for safety don’t have the capacity to shape their future. Let us not mistake this moment for liberation. Iranians didn’t ask for this war – it came to them. What comes next cannot continue to be bestowed through bombs. Freedom doesn’t sound like a siren.