TEHRAN — Millions of Iranians assembled in the streets of Tehran on Monday for the funeral procession of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war with the US and Israel.
Footage from Iranian state TV showed many tens of thousands of mourners gathered to watch Khamenei’s flag-draped coffin being transported by a lorry along a 10km (6-mile) route that passed through the capital’s landmark Enghelab Square.
Thousands had filled the Grand Mosalla on Sunday, where they paid their respects to Khamenei and his four family members.
The entire Iranian leadership, depleted by successive Israeli assassinations, turned out for the morning prayer with the one exception of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late supreme leader and now his appointed successor.
Three of Khamenei’s sons prayed beside his coffin but Mojtaba did not make an appearance.
Mojtaba has not been seen in public since reporting being seriously wounded in the same Israeli air strike in Tehran that killed his father and his wife.
Iranian officials said Khamenei’s absence was not due to wounds sustained in Israel’s attack on the presidential building but to concerns for his safety.
Khamenei’s funeral procession wended its way slowly through central Tehran, from Imam Hossein Square in the east to Azadi Square in the west, on the last of three days of public mourning in the capital.
Khamenei’s flag-draped coffin, and those of his family killed on Feb. 28, will be taken through the streets of Tehran on their way to Mehrabad International Airport.
State media reported that millions of mourners filled the main boulevards connecting the squares and crowding around the black lorry that carried the coffin of the late supreme leader and four family members.
Many people were waving Iranian flags and red banners symbolising vengeance.
There were also placards saying “We must rise” and others calling for the death of US President Donald Trump, who along with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a joint attack on Iran four months ago that triggered a war in which thousands were killed.
Mourners were also seen throwing stones at a billboard displaying Trump’s face that was hung from a bridge. “The US killed our father. We won’t let you go!” it read.
Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was seen at the procession, local media reported. It appeared to be his first major public appearance since the start of the war, when three of his bodyguards were reportedly killed in a strike near his home.
The new commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, Ahmad Vahidi, whose predecessor was killed on February 28, appeared at the funerals for a second time on Sunday, this time in the open air, after he went unseen throughout the war.
Esmail Qaani, the shadowy head of the Guards’ Quds Force — responsible for its foreign operations — also made a rare appearance.
The government is also eager to tout the mass mobilization in support of the authorities after mass protests in January that rights groups say were quelled by a crackdown that killed thousands of people.
Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was also filmed walking among a group of mourners on a Tehran street.
Earlier, he wrote on X that Khamenei had taught everyone in Iran that the country’s “greatest asset” was “its people and their unity”. He promised that Iranians would “continue the path of Iran’s honour, progress, and glory”.
The Iranian president praised the crowds’ orderly behavior and expressed hope that the images emerging from Iran would force the west to reflect on its determination to change Iran.
Rejecting Trump’s claim that the grief seen at the funeral had been “fake tears”, Pezeshkian said: “This greatness, these tears that flow from the eyes of girls, men, and children, is not something that can be created by order. Tears arise from the pain and sorrow that surges within a person, and the world sees this truth.”
Pezeshkian, a reformist elected two years ago who has put emphasis on building consensus within Iran’s political elite, said: “I do not accept the interpretation of farewell. It is a covenant for continuing on the path. This is not actually a farewell but rather a pact to continue on the path.
“By entering this war, the enemy disrupted the geography of the region, but in fact it strengthened the unity and cohesion among Muslims and even made the people of the world aware of its human rights claims.”
The funeral ceremonies are taking place less than three weeks after Iran and the US signed a preliminary agreement to end the war and reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz waterway, through which 20% of global oil and gas shipments pass.
Monday’s procession will be followed by similar events in the clerical hub of Qom on Tuesday and in Iraq’s holy cities of Najaf and Karbala on Wednesday, culminating in Khamenei’s burial in his hometown of Mashhad in northeastern Iran on Thursday.
Massive concrete walls separated the public from the coffin to prevent stampedes.
The 1989 funeral of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, drew some 10 million people, according to state news agency IRNA, and crowd surges killed more than 10 people and injured over 10,000.
As well as laying to rest the man who ruled the Islamic republic for more than three-and-a-half decades, the funerals are a chance for Iran’s authorities to burnish their resilience after five weeks at war with Israel and the United States.
Iran’s speaker of parliament and chief negotiator with the US, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — one of the most prominent faces of the post-Ali Khamenei era — hailed on X how the “proud and invincible nation of Islamic Iran unanimously” paid tribute to its “martyr.”
More than 300 foreign journalists, in addition to foreign reporters based in Iran, had been granted visas to report on the funeral and the display of national cohesion.
Khamenei long pursued a course of confrontation with the West, and Tehran for years has provided support to anti-US and anti-Israel armed groups around the Middle East, including Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, who both sent delegations to the ceremonies.
Source: Saudi Gazette