Arabs Divided Upon Khamenei’s Death: A Century of Unfinished Business

When news broke that Ali Khamenei was killed, Arab timelines did more than react.

Every response was a precise coordinate on a map of unresolved history the Arab world has been avoiding for a century.

Khamenei ruled for 35 years over a project that touched every Arab country without belonging to any of them. He funded militias in Iraq, propped up Assad in Syria, armed Hezbollah in Lebanon, backed the Houthis in Yemen, and positioned Iran as the last serious institutional sponsor of armed resistance to Israel. 

The Arab world’s reaction to his death is a direct receipt of everything that project built, destroyed, and left unresolved.

In Syria, Hadi Al Abdallah, a prominent journalist who spent years there documenting the destruction of his own country, posted a video on X that travelled far, reflecting the views of many Syrians like him. 

“Watching them pull him from the wreckage reminded me of pulling our children’s bodies from the wreckage. The Iranians that Ali Khamenei sent,” he said. He acknowledged the war was between criminals. Joy at the death of the unjust, he said, was natural and correct, and he would “feel it again when Zionist criminals fell too,” a statement that refused to be recruited by any side.

Iraq’s reaction carried a different kind of weight. With a Shia Muslim majority for whom Khamenei held genuine religious authority as a spiritual guide, grief in parts of the country ran deep. That devotion coexisted with something harder. When news of his death spread, thousands stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. Almost no other Arab country has had its borders more violated, its sovereignty more traded, its people more used as currency in other people’s wars. 

Rusly Al Maliki, an Iraqi author and analyst, had written weeks earlier that Iraq’s national security and the safety of its citizens had been traded away for Khamenei’s weapons and nuclear ambitions. He noted one country shared that fate almost identically.

That country was Lebanon, where Khamenei’s project was most intimate and arguably most devastating. Iran founded and funded Hezbollah from the ground up, embedding it into Shia communities that had lived through Israeli occupation and systematic marginalization. The project gradually consumed the Lebanese state already weakened by decades of Israeli invasions, sectarian division and foreign interference, until the country that was once the Arab world’s most cosmopolitan capital became a theater for regional wars its own government had no power to stop or start.

Lebanon mourned, though not with the devastation that followed Nasrallah’s death in 2025. Nasrallah was theirs, born in the south, buried in its soil. Khamenei was the patron. Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik spoke for those who grieved: “When the politicians led people into the valley of the Great Satan, Khamenei led us into Ali’s valley.”

Lebanese analyst Rami Najem asked something different, a question that few in Lebanese public life would have dared to ask aloud a decade ago: would the Lebanese state declare mourning for a foreign supreme leader, or choose its own sovereignty? 

Yemen is where easy readings collapse. The Houthi movement’s solidarity with Gaza has genuine popular roots, built from a population that survived what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The million-man marches for Palestine that filled Sanaa after October 2023 were not ordered by Tehran. 

One voice from Yemen captured what many there were saying. Aby Ali Hayyan said it on X: “Khamenei was martyred for Palestine, the most noble cause, in the best month of blessed Ramadan, while fasting.” “And look,” he added, at what they are now doing to American bases across Arab lands.

Yemeni poet Amer Alsaidi ran a different ledger, listing everything Iran could have done for Gaza and chose not to: the uranium it held, the militias it commanded, the oil wealth it controlled. “But arrogance, the delusion of divine selection, the illusion of power, and the commission of follies took them far.” He named a leadership that built an ideology around liberation and then calculated, when the moment came, that its own survival mattered more.

Palestine is the cause every side invoked and the people every side failed. Both of these voices came from inside Gaza, where the bombs were still falling. Muhammad Smiry refused every available frame: “Apparently the children in Gaza were not enough, now children in Iran are being killed too.” Jihad Helles drew a harder doctrinal line: “We disagree yes, we differ yes, we warn yes, but we do not hand over the necks of Muslims to an enemy that preys on the entire nation.”

As the region’s skies filled with missiles, Egyptian social media filled with memes, watching in eerie stillness. One post circulated widely: a map of the Middle East with Egypt at the center, ringed by explosion emojis.

Another was footage of protesters clashing, each group crudely labeled with dancing flag emojis, Iranian, American, Israeli, Emirati, Saudi, and then two bystanders tagged with the Egyptian flag appear in the foreground, close to the fighting but not in it. 

It was not wrong: Libya to the west, war in Sudan to the south, missiles in the east. A country invaded, occupied and instrumentalized by so many foreign powers across so many centuries that the region’s latest explosion registered less as threat and more as recurring pattern. Egypt has seen this before.

Jordan woke up with Iranian missiles crossing its airspace and American bases on its soil, the region’s most exposed balancing act suddenly visible from the sky. Its citizens posted selfies online showing the intercepts falling from above, a country so practiced at surviving the impossible that documenting the moment felt more natural than panic. Jordan has never fully belonged to any regional project, and when its citizens did speak, it mostly came in one direction. 

“No one is more protective of Jordan than our King,” went one post. “Jordan is a sovereign state governed by law and institutions, not by media pressure or political narratives,” went another. In Jordan, the king is the answer to every question, including the ones nobody asked.

Inside Iran, thousands mourned while others flooded the streets in celebration. The Arab world had spent decades arguing over Iran as a symbol, liberator to some, occupier to others, without fully reckoning with what Iranians themselves were living.

The man celebrated across social media as the last serious patron of resistance was, to millions of his own people, the face of a system that had impoverished them, imprisoned them and killed them in the streets. The argument Arabs were having about Khamenei, Iranians had been having for 35 years already, at far greater personal cost.

The fractures were drawn long before Khamenei was born. The borders enforced by Sykes-Picot in 1916 were drawn by empires, for empires, carving the region into states that had to invent their own legitimacy from scratch.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Khamenei built an empire on those fractures. News of his death forced every crack onto the timeline at once.

What we’re watching on Arab timelines is a hundred years of unfinished business arriving in a single afternoon.