His elder sister Fatemeh Hosseini Khamenei died in 2015, aged 89.His father was an ethnic Azerbaijani from Khamaneh, while his mother was an ethnic Persian from Yazd.Some of his ancestors are from Tafresh in today’s Markazi Province and migrated from their original home in Tafresh to Khamaneh near Tabriz. Khamenei’s great ancestor was Sayyid Hossein Tafreshi, a descendant of the Aftasi Sayyids, whose lineage supposedly reached to Sultan ul-Ulama Ahmad, known as Sultan Sayyid, a grandchild of Shia fourth Imam, Ali ibn Husayn.