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Khamenei represents the right, the conservative branch of revolutionaries who support private ownership and a more moderate rhetoric. Mousavi is regarded as a member of the left, the more radical group within the Islamic establishment, which advocates a more socialist economy and supports more government interference in people’s lives. Khomeini never fully supports one group against the others, but there are more leftists surrounding Khomeini than members of the right. Khomeini often has to mediate between Khamenei and Mousavi, and usually takes Mousavi’s side in decisions. Mousavi becomes known as “the imam’s prime minister.” Ali Khamenei’s strongest ally in the government is the head of the Majlis, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the closest person to Khomeini.

1988: THE END OF THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

After eight years of atrocities committed by both sides, the morale of the Iranian troops is weakened and international pressure on Iran to end the war mounts. Khomeini accepts the cease-fire in August 1988. He compares this to drinking “a chalice of poison.” The war ends with one million people wounded or killed, mostly Iranian. There is no tangible gain for either nation, except for a more tyrannical rule in both countries.

Before the end of the war, in 1986, the MKO terrorist group moves its headquarters to Iraq. After killing thousands of ordinary Iranians and top officials of the regime, and the imprisonment, torture, and execution of thousands of its own members, the MKO becomes part of Saddam Hussein’s army at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. Toward the end of the war, the leader of the group, Massoud Rajavi, tells his people that a weakened Khomeini regime is vulnerable and that the MKO can take over Tehran in less than a week. Almost seven thousand MKO members enter Iranian territory and are swiftly defeated by the Iranian army and the Revolutionary Guards. The number of casualties from both sides is somewhere between four and ten thousand killed or wounded.

The attack gives Khomeini the perfect excuse to reaffirm his waning authority at the end of the war by ordering the massacre of members of the MKO and other opposition groups. In less than six months, almost five thousand people, many of them prisoners and former prisoners, are summarily executed. The massacre is the most organized killing of opposition members in modern Iranian history. More than twenty years later, many of the people involved in the massacre are still in power in Iran or have become members of the opposition inside the country.

None of the high-ranking members of the regime dares to object to Khomeini’s actions, except for Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been regarded as his natural successor since the beginning of the revolution. Montazeri has been Khomeini’s acolyte since the 1940s, but his objection to the killing of thousands of young men and women leads to his dismissal by Khomeini, after which he is forced to spend the remainder of his life under virtual house arrest.

1989: RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI DIES; ALI KHAMENEI BECOMES SUPREME LEADER

On June 3, 1989, Khomeini dies after eleven days of hospitalization for internal bleeding. His funeral is the largest public gathering in Iran’s history.

After Khomeini’s death, the Assembly of Experts, which chooses the supreme leader and supervises his actions, gathers to select a successor. In the assembly, Rafsanjani lobbies for Ali Khamenei to succeed Khomeini. Many suspect that Rafsanjani supports Khamenei because he sees him as a weak character, a supreme leader he’ll be able to control. Rafsanjani becomes president, the post of prime minister is abolished, and Mir Hossein Mousavi resigns from politics. Mousavi continues to work as an artist and architect and eventually becomes the head of Iran’s Academy of Arts.

1989–97: AKBAR HASHEMI RAFSANJANI’S PRESIDENCY

Rafsanjani calls his tenure the “era of reconstruction” and proceeds with repairing the damage of the Iran-Iraq War, allowing the private sector to be more