Archiv: Ruhollah Khomeini


30.06.2026 - 09:44 [ ForeignPolicy.com / web.archive.org ]

When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes

(September / October 2014)

A few Iranian sources have previously pointed to a fatwa by the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, prohibiting chemical weapons as the explanation for why Iran did not deploy these weapons during the war with Iraq. But no details have ever been made public on when and how Khomeini issued such a fatwa, so it has been ignored for decades.

Now, however, the wartime chief of the Iranian ministry responsible for military procurement has provided an eyewitness account of Khomeini’s ban not only on chemical weapons, but on nuclear weapons as well. In an interview with me in Tehran in late September, Mohsen Rafighdoost, who served as minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) throughout the eight-year war, revealed that he had proposed to Khomeini that Iran begin working on both nuclear and chemical weapons — but was told in two separate meetings that weapons of mass destruction are forbidden by Islam.

10.03.2026 - 07:59 [ Tehran Times ]

Assembly of Experts elects Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s third Leader

The statement said the Assembly of Experts moved quickly to select a successor despite acute wartime conditions, direct threats against the institution and the bombing of the Assembly’s secretariat offices, which it said resulted in the deaths of several staff members and security personnel.

According to the statement, the body began preparations for an extraordinary session immediately after news of the Leader’s martyrdom. It said arrangements were made to gather its members from across the country in order to ensure that the Islamic Republic would not face a leadership vacuum.

Under Iran’s constitution, the Assembly of Experts — an 88-member clerical body elected by popular vote — is responsible for selecting and overseeing the country’s Leader.

20.05.2021 - 14:11 [ AtlanticCouncil.org ]

Supreme Leader directly intervenes in Iran’s June vote

(05.05.2021)

On April 10, Khamenei told a grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late leader of the 1979 revolution, that he should not run. Hassan Khomeini, who had already chosen a well-known revolutionary catchphrase of his grandfather—”All of us together”—as his campaign slogan, had perhaps the best potential to increase turnout in the election and provide a victory to the embattled reformist-pragmatist camp.

With Khomeini out of the game, this faction convened in late April to choose alternative candidates.