feb 11, 1979 - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, becomes the first supreme leader of Iran by overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi - ending a 2500-yearold Monarchy

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"The Shah of Iran, restored to power by the Americans in 1953, was consolidating an increasingly repressive regime which Washington found impossible to disavow… Iranians were sufficiently fed up by 1979 that they overthrew the Shah, denounced the US for supporting him, and installed in power under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the first radically Islamist government anywhere in the world. " (Gaddis 2006, p. 167)

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