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Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, a pillar of its theocratic system since the inception of the Islamic revolution, has seen off a succession of crises throughout his rule with a mixture of repression and strategic manoeuvring but now could be facing his biggest challenge.Khamenei, now 86, has dominated Iran for the last three-and-a-half decades since taking on the post for life in 1989 as leader of the Islamic revolution following the death of revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.He has remained in power after overcoming 1999 student demonstrations, 2009 mass protests sparked by disputed presidential elections, and 2019 demonstrations that were rapidly and brutally suppressed.He also survived the 2022-2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement sparked by the death in custody of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly violating the strict dress code for women.Khamenei was forced to go into hiding during the 12-day war against Israel in June, which exposed deep Israeli intelligence penetration of the Islamic republic that led to the killing of key security officials in air strikes.But he survived the war and, with nationwide protests again shaking the Islamic republic over the last fortnight, he emerged last Friday to give a characteristically defiant speech denouncing the protesters as a “bunch of vandals” backed by the United States and Israel.But even if he may have thwarted the current wave of protests with a crackdown that rights groups say has left thousands dead, his grasp on power is now shakier, analysts say.- ‘Public discontent’ -Under Khamenei “the system has faced repeated popular challenges to its rule, time and again crushing them with an iron fist and proceeding to govern as poorly as before,” the International Crisis Group said in a report published Wednesday on the protests.”That approach bought it time, but success measured only by the maintenance of coercive power gave the country’s leaders little impetus to address the grievances underlying public discontent.”Against the background of the constant threat of an Israeli or US strike to eliminate him, Khamenei lives under the tightest security.His relatively infrequent public appearances are never announced in advance or broadcast live, with his speech last Friday defying the protests first shown as a recording on the lunchtime state television news.As supreme leader he never sets foot outside the country, a precedent set by Khomeini following his triumphant return to Tehran from France in 1979 as the Islamic revolution rocked Iran.Khamenei’s last known foreign trip was an official visit to North Korea in 1989 as president, where he met Kim Il Sung.There has long been speculation about his health given his age, but there was nothing in his appearance last week — when he spoke steadily and clearly — to fuel any new rumours.Khamenei’s right arm is always inert. It was partially paralysed following an assassination attempt in 1981 authorities have always blamed on the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) group, one-time allies of the revolution now outlawed in the country. – ‘I am opposed’ -Repeatedly arrested under the shah for his anti-imperial activism, Khamenei shortly after the Islamic revolution became Friday prayer leader of Tehran and also served on the frontline during the Iran-Iraq war.He was elected president in 1981 following the assassination of Mohammad Ali Rajai, another attack blamed on the MEK. During the 1980s, Khomeini’s most likely successor was seen as the senior cleric Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri but the revolutionary leader changed his mind shortly before his death after Montazeri objected to the mass executions of MEK members and other dissidents.When Khomeini died and the Islamic republic’s top clerical body the Assembly of Experts met, it was Khamenei who they chose as leader.Khamenei famously initially rejected the nomination, putting his head in his hands in a show of despair and declaring, “I am opposed”. But the clerics stood in unison to seal his nomination and his grip on power has not slackened since.”Everyone knows the Islamic republic came to power with the blood of hundreds of thousands of honourable people, it will not back down in the face of saboteurs,” he said in his response to the protests on Friday in a customary show of defiance.Khamenei has now worked with six elected presidents, a far less powerful position than supreme leader, including more moderate figures like Mohammad Khatami who were allowed to make stabs at cautious reform and rapprochement with the West.But in the end, Khamenei has always come down on the side of hardliners and key elements of the system’s hardline ideology — confrontation with the “great Satan” the United States and refusal to recognise the existence of Israel — have remained intact.He is believed to have six children although only one, Mojtaba has public prominence. He was placed under sanctions by the United States in 2019 and is one of the most powerful backstage figures in Iran.A family dispute has also caught attention: his sister Badri fell out with her family in the 1980s and fled to Iraq in the war to join her husband, a dissident cleric. Some of their children, including a nephew who is now in France, have become vehement critics.

UK police on Wednesday admitted “mistakes” over the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a Europa League football match against Aston Villa in Birmingham, as calls mounted for the under-fire local chief constable to be sacked.West Midlands Police and its chief constable Craig Guildford have been under mounting pressure about how they came to the decision, which sparked political outrage in Britain and Israel.Birmingham’s population is 30 percent Muslim, according to the last census in 2021, and has seen several protests in support of Palestinians since the start of the war in Gaza, including on the night of the match.Interior minister Shabana Mahmood on Wednesday said she had lost confidence in Guildford, after a preliminary policing watchdog report found the force “overstated” the threat posed by Maccabi fans to justify the ban.”The chief constable of West Midlands Police no longer has my confidence,” Mahmood, who is also a local Birmingham MP, told parliament.The publication of the independent police watchdog’s report comes after months of scrutiny of the police force over the ban.The report led by police chief inspector Andy Cooke accused the force of “confirmation bias”. “Rather than follow the evidence, the force sought only the evidence to support their desired position to ban the fans,” said Mahmood.Cooke’s review “shows that the police overstated the threat posed by the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, while understating the risk that was posed to the Israeli fans if they travelled to the area,” Mahmood added.In a statement, West Midlands Police said: “We are extremely sorry for the impact these have had on individuals and their communities,” the statement said.”We know that mistakes were made, but reiterate the findings that none of this was done with an intent of deliberate distortion or discrimination.”The interior minister currently does not have the power to sack Guildford. But the regional police boss, who does, has so far declined to. In a statement on Wednesday, West Midlands police and crime commissioner Simon Foster said he was awaiting a parliamentary report on the matter before considering Guildford’s position.Maccabi fans were blocked from travelling to the match by the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG), which cited safety concerns based on advice from the police force.Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticised the move, as did Israeli politicians who denounced the decision as antisemitic.- ‘Inaccuracies’ -West Midlands Police had classified the match as “high risk”, but the police watchdog found eight “inaccuracies” in their advice to the SAG, including a reference to a non-existent game between Tel Aviv and West Ham, which was an “AI hallucination”.Earlier on Wednesday, Guildford apologised to MPs for providing erroneous evidence when he was questioned by them earlier this month.He had previously told MPs the error was the result of a Google search and denied the force had used artificial intelligence.But in a letter to MPs on Wednesday, Guildford admitted the erroneous information was due to the use of Microsoft Copilot, an AI chatbot.The watchdog’s report said other inaccuracies included West Midlands Police “greatly” exaggerating the problems in Amsterdam in November 2024 after Maccabi fans clashed with locals there, the review said. These included overstating the number of Dutch police officers deployed during the match and claims that fans were linked to the Israeli army.The review found “no evidence” to show that antisemitism was involved in the local police’s advice to SAG, but highlighted that the force “failed to consult representatives of the local Jewish community early enough”. Mahmood noted that while the government did not have the power to remove Guildford, it had been more than 20 years since a home secretary last made such a statement of no confidence in a police chief.

French publisher Hachette said Wednesday it was recalling three textbooks for high-school children which refer to the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks on the country as “Jewish settlers”.The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian armed group Hamas kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.The revision manuals for final-year students refer to all the victims as “Jewish settlers” — a term usually used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.”In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a large-scale humanitarian crisis in the region,” they state.French President Emmanuel Macron criticised them as “intolerable”. He said they were a “falsification of the facts” that amounted to “revisionism” in a post on the social media platform X.Yonathan Arfi, head of the French Jewish group Crif, said the text amounted to “a falsification of history and an unacceptable legitimisation of terrorism by Hamas, which this work notably fails to describe as a terrorist organisation”.The chairman of Hachette, Arnaud Lagardere, issued a statement to “personally offer my apologies to all those who may rightly have felt hurt, to the teaching staff, to the parents of students, and to the students themselves”.The company, France’s biggest publisher, has launched an internal investigation and is recalling an estimated 2,000 copies of the manuals. Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people were taken hostage, including 44 who were dead, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.jri-fff-slb-adp/jj

Iran warned the United States on Wednesday that it was capable of responding to any attack, as Washington appeared to be pulling personnel out of a base that Iran targeted in a strike last year.The tensions between the two foes, who have had no diplomatic relations since the Islamic revolution of 1979, come after President Donald Trump warned Tehran it could face action over a crackdown on protests that a rights group said had left at least 3,428 people dead.Rights groups say that under the cover of a more than five-day internet blackout, Iranian authorities are carrying out their most severe repression in years of protests that have openly challenged the theocratic system that has ruled Iran since the revolution.The head of the judiciary vowed fast-track trials for people arrested over the protests as fears grew that the authorities would make extensive use of capital punishment as a tool of repression.In Tehran, authorities held a funeral ceremony for more than 100 members of the security forces and other “martyrs” killed in the demonstrations, which authorities have accused protesters of using to wage “acts of terror”.Some personnel have been asked to depart the Al Udeid US military base in Qatar, two diplomatic sources told AFP on Wednesday, with the Gulf state saying “regional tensions” were behind the move.In June, Iran targeted the Al Udeid base in response to American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Trump that the strike on the base had demonstrated “Iran’s will and capability to respond to any attack”.The US embassy in Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, told its personnel on Wednesday to act with caution and avoid military installations.Trump on Tuesday said in a CBS News interview that the United States would act if Iran began hanging protesters.”We will take very strong action if they do such a thing,” he said. “When they start killing thousands of people — and now you’re telling me about hanging. We’ll see how that’s going to work out for them,” Trump said.- ‘Unprecedented level of brutality’ -Iran’s judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said on a visit to a prison holding protest detainees that “if a person burned someone, beheaded someone and set them on fire then we must do our work quickly”, in comments broadcast by state television.Iranian news agencies also quoted him as saying the trials should be held in public, and said he had spent five hours in a prison in Tehran to examine the cases.Footage broadcast by state media showed the judiciary chief seated before an Iranian flag in a large, ornate room in the prison, interrogating a prisoner himself. The detainee, dressed in grey clothing and his face blurred, is accused of taking Molotov cocktails to a park in Tehran.Monitor Netblocks said in a post to X on Wednesday that the internet blackout had now lasted 132 hours.Some information has trickled out of Iran, however. New videos on social media, with locations verified by AFP, showed bodies lined up in the Kahrizak morgue just south of the Iranian capital, with the corpses wrapped in black bags and distraught relatives searching for loved ones.In the face of the crackdown and communications blackout, evidence of protest activity has sharply diminished.The US-based Institute for the Study of War said the authorities were using an “unprecedented level of brutality to suppress protests”, and noted that reports of protest activity on Tuesday were at a “relatively low level”.A high-ranking Iranian official told journalists on Wednesday that there had been no new “riots” since Monday, drawing a distinction between previous cost-of-living protests and the more recent demonstrations.”Every society can expect protests, but we will not tolerate violence,” he said. – ‘Crush and deter dissent’ -Iranian prosecutors have said authorities would press capital charges of “waging war against God” against some detainees. According to state media, hundreds of people have been arrested.State media has also reported on the arrest of a foreign national for espionage in connection with the protests. No details were given on the person’s nationality or identity.The US State Department on its Persian-language X account said 26-year-old protester Erfan Soltani had been sentenced to be executed on Wednesday.”Concerns are mounting that authorities will once again resort to swift trials and arbitrary executions to crush and deter dissent,” Amnesty International said.The Norway-based Hengaw rights group, which has closely followed his case, said it had no new information about his fate as it was unable to contact the family due to the communications blackout.Iranian security forces have killed at least 3,428 protesters in their crackdown, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) NGO said Wednesday, adding that more than 10,000 people had also been arrested.The group’s director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam condemned the “mass killing of protesters on the streets in recent days”, while IHR warned that the new figure represented an “absolute minimum” for the actual toll.Asked about the number of deaths, another government official said Wednesday that “we do not have any number yet”, adding victims were still being identified.At Wednesday’s funeral ceremony in Tehran, thousands of people waved flags of the Islamic republic as prayers were read out for the dead outside Tehran University, according to images broadcast on state television.”Death to America!” read banners held up by people attending the rally, while others carried photos of Khamenei.

Syria’s army told civilians to stay away from Kurdish military positions east of second city Aleppo on Wednesday, after it moved reinforcements to the area following deadly clashes last week.The deployment comes as Syria’s Islamist-led government seeks to extend its authority across the country, but progress has stalled on integrating the Kurds’ de facto autonomous administration and forces into the central government under a deal reached in March.The Syrian military said in a statement it urges “our civilian population to stay away” from all Kurdish military positions east of Aleppo, adding that “a humanitarian corridor will be opened towards the city of Aleppo” on Thursday morning until the afternoon.The army had closed several roads in the eastern Aleppo province “for security reasons”.The United States, which for years has supported Kurdish fighters but also backs Syria’s new authorities, urged all parties to “avoid actions that could further escalate tensions” in a statement by the US military’s Central Command chief Admiral Brad Cooper.Syrian state television on Tuesday published an army statement with a map declaring a large area east of Aleppo city a “closed military zone” and said “all armed groups in this area must withdraw to the east of the Euphrates” River.The area, controlled by Kurdish forces, extends from near Deir Hafer, around 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Aleppo, to the Euphrates about 30 kilometres further east, as well as towards the south.State news agency SANA published images on Wednesday showing military reinforcements en route from the coastal province of Latakia, while a military source on the ground, requesting anonymity, said reinforcements were arriving from both Latakia and the Damascus region.Both sides reported limited skirmishes overnight. Kurdish forces in a statement accused government troops of bombing a post office, a bakery and other civilian facilities in Deir Hafer, warning of “a wider confrontation and its serious repercussions on civilians, infrastructure, and vital facilities”.An AFP correspondent on the outskirts of Deir Hafer reported hearing intermittent artillery shelling on Wednesday, which the military source said was due to government targeting of positions belonging to the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.- ‘Declaration of war’ -The SDF controls swathes of the country’s oil-rich north and northeast, much of which it captured during Syria’s civil war and the fight against the Islamic State group.On Monday, Syria accused the SDF of sending reinforcements to Deir Hafer and said it would send its own personnel there in response.Kurdish forces on Tuesday denied any build-up of their personnel and accused the government of attacking the town, while state television said SDF sniper fire there killed one person.Cooper urged “a durable diplomatic resolution through dialogue”.Elham Ahmad, a senior official in the Kurdish administration, said that government forces were “preparing themselves for another attack”.”The real intention is a full-scale attack” against Kurdish-held areas, she told an online press conference, accusing the government of having made a “declaration of war” and breaking the March agreement on integrating Kurdish forces.Syria’s government took full control of Aleppo city over the weekend after capturing its Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsud and Ashrafiyeh neighbourhoods and evacuating fighters there to Kurdish-controlled areas in the northeast.Both sides traded blame over who started the violence last week that killed dozens of people and displaced tens of thousands.- PKK, Turkey -On Tuesday in Qamishli, the main Kurdish city in the country’s northeast, thousands of people demonstrated against the Aleppo violence, with some burning pictures of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, an AFP correspondent said.Turkey has long been hostile to the SDF, seeing it as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a major threat along its southern border. Last year, the PKK announced an end to its long-running armed struggle against the Turkish state and began destroying its weapons, but Ankara has insisted that the move includes armed Kurdish groups in Syria.On Tuesday, the PKK called the “attack on the Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo” an attempt to sabotage peace efforts between it and Ankara.A day earlier, Ankara’s ruling party levelled the same accusation against Kurdish fighters.The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 45 civilians killed in the Aleppo violence, as well as 60 soldiers and fighters from both sides.Aleppo civil defence official Faysal Mohammad said Tuesday that 50 bodies had been recovered from the Kurdish-majority neighbourhoods after the fighting.bur-strs/lar/lg/nad/jfx

The planet logged its third hottest year on record in 2025, extending a run of unprecedented heat, with no relief expected in 2026, global climate monitors said Wednesday.The last 11 years have now been the warmest ever recorded, with 2024 topping the podium and 2023 in second place, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation.For the first time, global temperatures exceeded 1.5C relative to pre-industrial times on average over the last three years, Copernicus said in its annual report.”The warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” Berkeley Earth said in a separate report.The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement commits the world to limiting warming to well below 2C and pursuing efforts to hold it at 1.5C — a long-term target scientists say would help avoid the worst consequences of climate change.UN chief Antonio Guterres warned in October that breaching 1.5C was “inevitable” but the world could limit this period of overshoot by cutting greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.Copernicus said the 1.5C limit “could be reached by the end of this decade -– over a decade earlier than predicted”.But efforts to contain global warming were dealt another setback last week as President Donald Trump said he would pull the United States — the world’s second-biggest polluter after China — out of the bedrock UN climate treaty.Temperatures were 1.47C above pre-industrial times in 2025 — just a fraction cooler than in 2023 — following 1.6C in 2024, according to Copernicus.The World Meteorological Organization, the UN’s weather and climate agency, said two of eight datasets it analysed showed 2025 was the second warmest year, but the other six datasets ranked it third.The WMO put the 2023-2025 average at 1.48C but with a margin of uncertainty of plus-minus 0.13C.Despite the cooling La Nina weather phenomenon, 2025 “was still one of the warmest years on record globally because of the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere”, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement.Some 770 million people experienced record-warm annual conditions where they live, while no record-cold annual average was logged anywhere, according to Berkeley Earth.The Antarctic experienced its warmest year on record while it was the second hottest in the Arctic, Copernicus said.An AFP analysis of Copernicus data last month found that Central Asia, the Sahel region and northern Europe experienced their hottest year on record in 2025.- 2026: Fourth-warmest? -Berkeley and Copernicus both warned that 2026 would not break the trend.If the warming El Nino weather phenomenon appears this year, “this could make 2026 another record-breaking year”, Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, told AFP.”Temperatures are going up. So we are bound to see new records. Whether it will be 2026, 2027, 2028 doesn’t matter too much. The direction of travel is very, very clear,” Buontempo said.Berkeley Earth said it expected this year to be similar to 2025, “with the most likely outcome being approximately the fourth-warmest year since 1850″.- Emissions fight -The reports come as efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the main driver of climate change — are stalling in developed countries.Emissions rose in the United States last year, snapping a two-year streak of declines, as bitter winters and the AI boom fuelled demand for energy, the Rhodium Group think tank said Tuesday.The pace of reductions of greenhouse gas emissions slowed in Germany and France.”While greenhouse gas emissions remain the dominant driver of global warming, the magnitude of this recent spike suggests additional factors have amplified recent warming beyond what we would expect from greenhouse gases and natural variability alone,” said Berkeley Earth chief scientist Robert Rohde.The organisation said international rules cutting sulphur in ship fuel since 2020 may have actually added to warming by reducing sulphur dioxide emissions, which form aerosols that reflect sunlight away from Earth.