For four months, Iran feared it was too dangerous to lay to rest Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader who was killed in an airstrike on the first day of the joint U.S.-Israeli war.
Now, shielded by a tentative truce — and perhaps by an America distracted by its 250th July Fourth celebration — millions of Iranians are expected to mourn over several days of funeral rites that will stretch across five cities and into neighboring Iraq.
For the surviving Iranian regime, the funeral offers an opportunity to project power after withstanding months of war with Israel and the United States, but it will also be a high-profile test of the government’s postwar competence.
Khamenei’s body was moved to Tehran, the capital, on Thursday for a private ceremony at the place where he was killed — the small compound that served as his office and residence.
On Friday, his coffin was moved to Grand Mosalla religious complex where it sat beside the coffins of other family members killed in the same strike, including his daughter and her husband. The smallest coffin was that of Khamenei’s granddaughter, who was 14 months old.
Images distributed by state media showed foreign dignitaries, including leaders from Iraq, Qatar, and Tajikistan, as well as family members of the assassinated Hezbollah commander, Hasan Nasrallah, filing past the coffins as they arrived in Iran ahead of the funeral.
Also shown paying his respects was the son of anti-Taliban Afghan commander Ahmed Shah Massoud.
The funeral organizer said no officials were invited from Europe or the United States. Official banners prepared for the event declared “We must rise” and carried the image of a red fist.
Security was expected to be tight, with sections of the capital Tehran already going into lockdown Friday.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has been a key figure in peace talks with the U.S., issued a statement on Thursday calling on the Iranian people to “rise up and convey the nation’s call for bloodshed.”
“Iran stands on the threshold of creating one of the greatest scenes in its history, a day when a nation, with hearts full of love, loyalty, and the pain of separation, comes to bid farewell to a great man,” Ghalibaf said.
The cavernous prayer hall where Khamenei’s coffin was put on display Friday to lie in state was named after his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the country’s Islamic revolution, took power in 1979, and died a decade later.
Khamenei led the Islamic Republic for 37 years, through wars and uprisings, and years of enmity and tangled negotiations with Washington over Iran’s nuclear program. Under his leadership, Iran repressed freedoms domestically and expanded its role as the patron of violent proxy militant groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas, which it used to confront the U.S. and Israel.
Khamenei was killed in the opening hours of a war that has transformed Iran yet again, devastating the country’s infrastructure and leadership ranks, but ultimately seeming to strengthen its position regionally and in ceasefire talks with the U.S. — notably because of its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.
As Iranians mourn their assassinated leader, they and observers around the world will be watching the funeral for signals about the surviving regime, which is younger and even more hard-line. Among the top questions is whether Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba, will appear in public for the first time since his father’s death.
Mojtaba is believed to have been seriously injured in that strike, including serious damage to his face. His wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, was also killed.
Mojtaba Khamenei has been living under intense security measures given the expectation that he, too, will be a target for assassination.
Even in peacetime, he kept a low profile. He has only been photographed in public a few times and, before his designation as the new leader, most Iranians had never heard him speak publicly.
Up until now, Iranians who support their government say they understand why their supreme leader has been unable to appear in public. But the further the country moves away from active war, the more people may demand an appearance.
“If he doesn’t show up, it does become significant,” said Norman Roule, a former CIA officer who worked on Iran for decades, adding that the move would indicate that he is breaking from the rule of his father in which revolutionary symbolism was critically important.
If Khamenei does appear — in person or by video — experts will be scouring images for clues about his injuries, officials said, while also searching for broader signs of the regime’s cohesion and capabilities.
Observers will also be tracking the scale of the event, including whether the government can orchestrate convincing shows of public support beyond the tightly controlled capital. They will also be monitoring how much security is mobilized.
And as the country shifts away from a war footing, its economic challenges will become more pronounced. Inflation has skyrocketed, and energy exports fell to near zero for weeks. The country’s industrial sector was heavily damaged by U.S. and Israeli strikes.
Over Ali Khamenei’s decades as supreme leader, public dissatisfaction with the Iranian system grew, triggering repeated waves of protests. And in the past five years, demonstrations seemed to threaten the Islamic Republican at least twice.
In each instance, Khamenei ordered violent crackdowns with escalating cruelty to clear city streets. The most recent crackdown in January is estimated to have killed thousands of people over just three days, a remarkable scale of brutality.
After the mourning ceremonies in Tehran, Khamenei’s body will be taken to the holy Iranian city of Qom, then on to neighboring Iraq where crowds will gather in the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala, before he is finally laid to rest in his hometown, the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad.
The ceremonies will present a serious logistical challenge for the Iranian regime. Local officials in Tehran say they are expecting crowds of up to 20 million.
Authorities are keen to avoid the kind of chaotic scenes that marked previous burials. Eight people were trampled to death when Khomeini was buried in 1989. And dozens were killed in 2020 during crowd crushes at the funeral for Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, then Iran’s most powerful military commander, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump.
