Successor Absent As Iran Buries Leader Buried Leader Ayatollah Killed In US-Israeli Strikes
Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was buried in the country’s holiest shrine, state media said early on Friday, after huge crowds gathered for his funeral with his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei still hidden from public view.
The burial in Mashhad in northeast Iran follows a week of mass funeral processions, rallies and mourning ceremonies that has coincided with a renewed burst of conflict with the United States following weeks of truce in the four-month-old war.
Khamenei was killed in the first strikes of the war launched by the United States and Israel on February 28.
The U.S. and Iran agreed to a truce last month.
Khamenei’s body was carried slowly by truck on Thursday through the crammed Mashhad streets towards the gilt dome and minarets of the Shrine of Imam Reza as white-turbaned clerics walked on either side.
Black-clad mourners pressed close behind, waving Iranian flags, photographs of the late Khamenei and red placards with revolutionary slogans.
The burial is the culmination of a week of funeral events in both Iran and Iraq that the Islamic Republic’s clerical leaders encouraged huge crowds to attend in an effort to display the might and ideological fervor of their theocratic state.
The whereabouts of Mojtaba Khamenei, proclaimed supreme leader by a clerical assembly in early March, a week after his father’s death, has remained a mystery to Iranians.
He has not appeared in public since the war began. While he has made written statements, no image, video or voice recording of him has been issued.
He suffered debilitating injuries in the strike that killed his father, his face disfigured and limbs badly wounded.
Senior sources in Tehran have said he is recovering but that he has not yet been well enough to manage public appearances. State security services are also trying to limit his exposure in case of more U.S. attacks.
As crowds jostled in Mashhad awaiting Khamenei’s funeral cortege, the crowd chanted slogans demanding revenge on U.S. President Donald Trump for his killing.
“I swear by the blood of the supreme leader, Trump, we will kill you!” they shouted, with women holding up placards reading “Kill Trump”.
The shrine’s courtyard was a mass of mourners as dusk fell, their defiant chants of “Death to America” ringing out above the lyrical funeral laments and string music broadcast by loudspeakers.
A helicopter lifted Khamenei’s coffin from the truck over the impenetrable crowd for the final short stretch to a blue-tiled arched recess at the shrine.
Khamenei’s oldest son, Mostafa, said the funeral prayer, and a throng of male mourners carried the coffin, painted in the red, white and green of Iran’s flag, inside the shrine.
Many of those gathered inside held candles, stretched their arms toward the coffin and wept, video showed.
The official IRNA news agency reported early on Friday that the burials of Khamenei and four family members killed alongside him were completed.
Imam Reza was one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest figures and the shrine complex in Mashhad, Khamenei’s hometown, is a centre for pilgrimage.
Khamenei’s remains were previously paraded through Tehran, the Shi’ite Muslim clerical centre of Qom and the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.
At each event, huge crowds have thronged the streets to the mournful accompaniment of sung Shi’ite laments and chanted revolutionary slogans.
Martyrdom holds a central place in Shi’ite theology, and Khamenei’s death at the hands of foreign enemies has played into a religious and political tradition that runs deep through the Islamic Republic.
REUTERS
