Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

Ahmad Khomeini, 50, son of Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A cleric and politician, the younger Khomeini lived for years in his father's shadow but had been expected to seize power after the ayatollah's death in 1989. Instead, he kept a low profile, apparently seeking to act as a powerbroker. In Tehran on Thursday six days after suffering a massive heart attack.

On June 20, a young Iranian woman was shot dead at one of the mass protests that followed the contested re- election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Millions of people around the world watched video of Neda Agha-Soltan hemorrhaging on Tehran's Karegar Street, and hers became the tragic, beautiful and galvanizing face of the reform movement in Iran. Witnesses implicated a member of the Basij, the governmental militia, in Agha-Soltan's death. But an Iranian ambassador and ayatollah quickly pinned her shooting on the CIA and her fellow protesters, while a broadcasting official -- and a government-sponsored documentary that aired last month -- said the death had been simulated by the Western news media and by Agha-Soltan herself.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is making satisfactory progress from surgery 10 days ago to stem bleeding in his stomach, his doctors said Friday.

Itried to visit Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri once. He was 75 years old and had just been placed under house arrest. It was November 1997. My interpreter and I drove through the streets of the holy city of Qom searching for him. We'd been directed to his neighborhood by a minor dissident cleric we'd found teaching a Koran class. Now we stopped and asked every few blocks whether anyone knew which house was belonged to Montazeri. Qom is a smallish city, the foremost center of Shiite scholarship in the world and the place where the Iranian revolution was born.

Iran's third election since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in the 1979 revolution will be held next spring, possibly after the Iranian New Year, Tehran announced today.

President Saddam Hussein met Sunday with Massoud Rajavi, leader of the Iranian opposition to the Islamic regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to discuss the situation in the region, the official Iraqi News Agency said.

Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini left his hospital bed today for the first time since undergoing surgery and rested on a chair, Tehran Radio quoted his doctors as saying. A medical bulletin read on the radio said Khomeini, 89, was recovering "very well" and the Tuesday operation had controlled bleeding in his digestive tract.

I was amused by a statement made by Raymond Price in the commentary "Operation a Success, but the Patient Died" (Op-Ed Page, July 8): "The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his fanatic followers have made blind hatred national policy and given savagery a bad name." Since when has savagery ever had a good name? PAUL McDERMOTT Los Angeles

A senior Iranian official denied reports that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is terminally ill. Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashami was quoted by Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency, monitored in Nicosia, Cyprus, as saying that the nation's spiritual leader "is now in perfect shape." Khomeini, 88, has been reported to be in frail health since he suffered a heart attack two years ago. There have also been unconfirmed reports that he has cancer.

Thousands of supporters of Iran's most senior dissident cleric marched through streets in his hometown and descended upon the country's main theological center Sunday to mourn his passing just days before the climax of a politically charged religious commemoration. Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a pillar of the Islamic Revolution three decades ago who became a staunch defender of the nation's current opposition movement, died late Saturday of complications from advanced age, diabetes and asthma, his doctor told state television.

Political turmoil built Sunday over the burning of an image of Iran's revolutionary founder, which was aired, in a controversial move, on state television. Accusations that the incident was carried out by anti-government demonstrators sparked protests as well as threats against reformist leaders. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday said reformist politicians and anti-government demonstrators had defiled the image of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, during National Students Day protests last week.

From the house we built With blood and soil To the road on which The moonlight procession Flies forth on their boat Of shooting stars It is a pity you did not wish To stay here with us The poet had crafted those words so long ago. Flush from the victory of a People's Revolution in Iran that ousted a repressive monarch for a bearded cleric who spouted promises of freedom and quality, Partow Nooriala all too soon came to believe that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had deceived them.

Re "A familiar, unpredictable rebellion," Opinion, June 18 Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi is not an outsider. That's why he was allowed by the Islamist Guardian Council to run for president. He has been part of the same establishment since the 1979 revolution. He was Iran's prime minister during the bloody war with Iraq and a staunch supporter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The recent gesturing is nothing more than a power struggle between a bunch of religious fanatics.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's restrained line toward the United States attacks on Afghanistan came under fire Saturday from his own defense minister as being too soft on the "enemy." Relentless U.S. attacks on neighboring Muslim Afghanistan and a spate of youth riots in Iran have provided fodder for a hard-line argument that Khatami may be sacrificing Iran's revolutionary legacy for better ties with the West.

From time to time, the lone caretaker at the dreary cemetery gets a letter from abroad asking him to light a candle at one of the hundreds of identical headstones at the far end of the walled, unmarked graveyard. A forgotten chapter of World War II is buried in this Roman Catholic cemetery in a poor neighborhood of Tehran. Occasional candles are the only flickers of remembrance for these 1,892 Polish men, women and children far from home and for the calamity that befell them.

Ahmad Khomeini, 50, son of Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A cleric and politician, the younger Khomeini lived for years in his father's shadow but had been expected to seize power after the ayatollah's death in 1989. Instead, he kept a low profile, apparently seeking to act as a powerbroker. In Tehran on Thursday six days after suffering a massive heart attack.