It is located 2 kilometers (1 mi) of Vahnabad and 35 kilometres (22 miles) southwest of Tehran and is named for Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's first supreme leader.

However, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shut it down soon after the first plane landed, citing security fears over allowing foreigners to run the airport.

The airport city is located at the end of Rabat Karim and Ray counties in Tehran province and under Vahnabad Rural District (formerly a part of it).

Part of the CNS equipment of the airport city, such as the special ILS approach and the right runway 29 (29R) as the main landing strip for foreign planes and the side taxiway, are located in this area.

The city was then the centre of the Middle East, and air traffic was increasing quickly at the existing Mehrabad Airport.

Due to the economic impact of the war and Iran's isolation in the international community, President Akbar Rafsanjani focused on other endeavours in the early 1990s.

[2] In 1995, the French firm Aéroports de Paris was selected as the primary consultant, and construction of the terminal, which Paul Andreu had redesigned, started.

[2] In 2003, Tepe-Akfen-Vie (TAV), a Turkish-Austrian consortium, reached an agreement with the reformist administration of Mohammad Khatami to operate the terminal and construct a second one.

[9] Officials wanted the airport to represent Iran's opening to the international community and hoped it would become the largest in the Middle East.

[10] On 7 May 2004, the military forced TAV's staff to leave the premises with their equipment and granted management of the facility to Iran Air.

[6] Later that year, the conservative-dominated parliament impeached Khatami's minister of transportation, Ahmad Khorram, partly because of the TAV contract.

[15] According to Ray Takeyh, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the likely reason for the closure was that "the local interest, particularly Revolutionary Guards, desired a greater share of the profits".

[16] By March 2008, all international flights excluding those for the Hajj and Umrah had relocated from Mehrabad to Imam Khomeini Airport.

[20] Air France, Alitalia, British Airways and KLM resumed service to Tehran in 2016 following the Iran nuclear deal.

[22][23] Analysts said the main reason for the airlines' decisions was that the United States had exited the nuclear agreement and decided to reinstate sanctions on Iran.

[35] In the fiscal year ending on 20 March 2019, the airport handled 7.27 million passengers, making it the third busiest in Iran.