India, March 1 -- Ali Khamenei, Iran's longest-serving Supreme Leader and the country's most powerful political and religious authority for over three decades, has died, closing a defining chapter in the Islamic Republic's history.

Born in 1939 in Mashhad, Khamenei emerged from the clerical networks that opposed the Shah, aligning himself early with revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini.

Arrested multiple times before the 1979 revolution, he built a reputation as a committed ideologue shaped by exile, prison and underground activism.

That same year, he became Iran's president, serving from 1981 to 1989 during the brutal Iran-Iraq War. Though the presidency carried limits under the Islamic Republic's structure, the war years deepened h...