{"id":254753,"date":"2025-06-20T18:05:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T17:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsisc.com\/videos\/from-accidental-to-absolute-leader-who-is-ayatollah-khamenei\/"},"modified":"2025-06-20T18:05:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T17:05:06","slug":"from-accidental-to-absolute-leader-who-is-ayatollah-khamenei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsisc.com\/videos\/from-accidental-to-absolute-leader-who-is-ayatollah-khamenei\/","title":{"rendered":"From accidental to absolute leader \u2013 who is Ayatollah Khamenei?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i4.ytimg.com\/vi\/_HYCZEMDYrg\/hqdefault.jpg\" alt=\"From accidental to absolute leader \u2013 who is Ayatollah Khamenei?\"><br \/> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_HYCZEMDYrg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p>Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran\u2019s often reclusive supreme leader, surfaced this week to hit back at Donald Trump\u2019s demands for an unconditional surrender. \u00a0<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nKhamanei first came to power as President of Iran in 1981, and he was a surprise choice for supreme leader eight years later. But since then, with the help of the Revolutionary Guard he has had almost complete control of Iran and its anti-Israel and anti-American foreign policy agenda.\u00a0<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nSky\u2019s Tom Cheshire speaks to Alex Vatanka,\u00a0founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC about how Khamanei is viewed inside Iran and how his policies contributed to the current crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Producer: Soila Apparicio\u00a0<br \/>\nAssistant producer: Araminta Parker\u00a0<br \/>\nEditor: Wendy Parker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran\u2019s often reclusive supreme leader, surfaced this week to hit back at Donald Trump\u2019s demands for an unconditional surrender. \u00a0 \u00a0 Khamanei first came to power as President of Iran in 1981, and he was a surprise choice for supreme leader eight years later. But since then, with the help of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":254754,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[128811],"tags":[145640,132139,145641],"actors":[],"class_list":["post-254753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sky-news","tag-ayatollah","tag-irans","tag-khamenei"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>From accidental to absolute leader \u2013 who is Ayatollah Khamenei? | News ISC Videos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Watch From accidental to absolute leader \u2013 who is Ayatollah Khamenei? for free, here on News ISC. 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