Missiles Made a Martyr

Foreign force forged global defiance.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination has done something the US and Israel never intended - it’s turned Iran’s head of state and religious leader into a martyr at home and, for millions around the world - a symbol of defiance against imperial power.

With six missiles, Washington and Tel Aviv confirmed the darkest suspicions of many Iranians and much of the Global South - that the “rules-based order” is a mask for raw force, and that leaders who refuse to submit can be killed in their own homes and then justified away as “legitimate targets.”

For decades, US policy toward Iran has been defined not by understanding but by domination. Iran has been treated as a problem to be managed, a regime to be broken, and a battlefield on which to signal strength to domestic lobbies and regional allies.

The history is long and bitter - the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh for daring to nationalise oil; support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war; layer after layer of sanctions that punished ordinary Iranians while

Washington spoke of “human rights.” Each step reinforced a message Iranians have heard loud and clear: your sovereignty is conditional, and your resources are ours to police.

Khamenei was the embodiment of a system many Iranians opposed, resisted and tried to reform. Yet the manner of his death - killed by foreign missiles in a joint operation by the US and Israel-cuts across internal fault lines and speaks to something more primal: the refusal of an outside power to accept Iran, however flawed its government, is a country that decides its own fate.

By killing Khamenei Washington and Tel Aviv didn’t just target a ruler; they attempted to assert no Iranian leader who rejects their terms has the right to feel safe on Iranian soil.

The US’s arrogance is staggering. US officials talk about “surgical strikes,” “degrading capabilities,” and “short, decisive operations,” as if they’re describing a lab experiment rather than a country of more than 90m people with a deep, resilient culture. They speak of deterrence and stability while their actions ignite fury across a region already scarred by Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya and Gaza.

Israeli leaders, long fixated on the idea their security requires permanent military superiority and the political submission of their neighbours, have cheered on escalation with Iran for years. Together, these two states treat the Middle East as a chessboard on which they move pieces - bases, regimes, factions – while populations are expected to submit or be crushed.

What they’ve never properly reckoned with is the Iranian people themselves. Iran is a society that’s endured monarchy, revolution, war, sanctions and isolation- and kept going. Iranians have buried hundreds of thousands from the Iran -Iraq war, lived through chemical attacks, tolerated blackouts and empty shelves, watched their currency collapse and their loved ones emigrate. Yet they still crowd bookshops, make films that win awards, produce science, defend their poetry and their language, and insist - quietly or loudly - that Iran will not be a client state. That stubborn insistence is what Washington’s planners, and counterparts in Tel Aviv, consistently underestimate.

The response to Khamenei’s death has made that miscalculation brutally clear. Inside Iran, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have filled the streets, not because everyone suddenly forgot the system’s repression, but because the sight of their country’s highest official killed by foreign powers triggers something deeper than ideology: outrage at humiliation – but in the West they refuse to acknowledge the fury of the Iranian people, just as they have refused to report and condemn the killing of 150 innocent school girls.

For many, the supreme leader’s death is now folded into a story of sacrifice in an existential struggle.

Khamenei becomes the man who refused to bend and paid with his life, and whose blood demands Iran stand even more firmly against outside coercion. That’s how martyrs are made.

Meanwhile, Israel’s own leader has offered a grim counterpoint. As missiles and drones fly, Benjamin Netanyahu’s official jet is tracked outside Israel, reportedly relocated to Berlin, fuelling a firestorm of anger and mockery. Netanyahu is a coward.

While Iranians pour into the streets around the shattered compound of a leader who died on his own soil, Israel’s prime minister is seen as sending his plane – and perhaps himself – to safety in Europe.

It crystallises a brutal contrast: in Tehran, a leader turned martyr in the line of fire; in Israel, a leader derided as a coward, sheltering under Europe’s wing while demanding others fight and die in his war.

But the transformation you’re interested in doesn’t stop at Iran’s borders. Across the Muslim world, particularly among Shia communities and movements already aligned with Tehran, Khamenei is elevated as a global figure of admiration. Leaders of resistance groups, clerics and commentators describe him as a martyr of the ummah, a guide who stood up to what they see as US-Israeli tyranny.

In the Global South, where memories of coups, IMF diktats and drone wars are fresh, Khamenei’s killing is read through a familiar lens - a powerful state exterminating a troublesome leader and calling it “security.” For them, Khamenei is more than the head of an Islamic Republic; he is a symbol of the refusal to submit to an order written elsewhere.

It mightn’t be a unanimous view, of course, as various Iranians in exile, and inside Iran, have celebrated his death, seeing it as the end of a long and supposed harsh era.

The Western media describe the assassination as removing an obstacle to change. But opinion pieces and street celebrations in comfortable capitals don’t erase the reality that, in large parts of the world, Washington and Tel Aviv have handed their critics a potent image: a frail, elderly religious leader, killed under foreign bombardment because Iran wouldn’t accept their terms. For them, he’s a global hero precisely because of who killed him and why.

Behind all this lies the machinery of influence that keeps pushing Washington toward confrontation. A tight network of hawkish think tanks, defence contractors, and lobby organisations has spent years narrowing the debate to one basic question: how to pressure Iran harder.

They sell fantasies of easy victories and “limited wars” to presidents who fear looking weak, while reassuring donors and allies their interests will be protected.

In that world, diplomacy is seen as weakness, compromise as betrayal, and any leader in Tehran who refuses to capitulate becomes a legitimate target.

Israel’s government, deeply enmeshed in this ecosystem, has championed the line only relentless pressure and occasional spectacular violence can keep it safe. The result is a politics in which killing a foreign head of state is considered tough, smart and necessary.

Measured against the moral and strategic wreckage this approach has produced, the Iranian response begins to look not like fanaticism but clarity.

In only four days, Iran’s retaliatory strikes across the region – on bases, embassies and logistical hubs – have shown that US power in the Middle East is no longer uncontested. American installations that once operated as untouchable forward fortresses are now under constant threat, forcing hurried evacuations, relocations and “temporary” drawdowns.

For many in the region, it feels like the beginning of the end of Washington’s era of impunity: the moment when the US starts to discover that it can’t bomb at will and still expect to remain planted in the heart of the Middle East forever.

A nation that’s been lied to, sanctioned, bombed by proxies and directly attacked has drawn a simple conclusion - it must rely on itself, deepen its alliances with those who share its grievances, and refuse to kneel even when the cost is terrible.

The admiration many feel for Iran and for Khamenei in death is bound up with that refusal. They see a country that, whatever its internal problems, won’t hand over its sovereignty just because a superpower demands it. They see a leader who died under that pressure rather than sign away what Iran believed were its core rights.

Killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the US and Israel believed they were removing an obstacle and demonstrating strength. Instead, they’ve minted a martyr, sharpened global anger at their impunity, and invited the world to see the Iranian people not as caricatures in someone else’s narrative, but as a proud nation under siege that won’t bend to those it regards as aggressors.

That’s the essence of this moment - a self-proclaimed order built on “rules” revealing its violence in full, and a society, bloodied but unbroken, answering with defiance-and with a new, dangerous symbol to rally around.