In the final weeks before his death, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cast the mounting hostility of U.S. President Donald Trump in religious and explicitly Shiite terms. Rejecting calls for capitulation, he invoked the example of Imam Hussein—the third imam, or spiritual leader, of the Shiites—refusing to pledge allegiance to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler widely associated in Shiite memory with tyranny and injustice. Defiance, in this light, was not simply a strategic imperative but a value rooted in history and identity.
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