In the small hours of Friday the police roadblocks, stalls, posters and army vans were starting to appear across Tehran as millions of Iranians prepared to attend the long-delayed six-day funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei’s, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 turbulent years,
The Guardian reports.
Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the funeral is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion. Small groups of mourners carrying flags were gathering along the roads festooned with the red fist, the symbol of the funeral alongside the slogan “We must rise”. At a ceremony dedicated to the families of martyrs, Khamenei’s coffin was displayed.
Iran’s first vice-president, Mohammad Reza Aref, who is the lead funeral organiser, described the ceremony, which begins on Saturday in Tehran and will end with Khamenei’s burial on Thursday in Mashhad, as “the most important event of this century” and the most attended event since the 1979 revolution.
The funeral’s scale has been conceived to relay political and religious messages of resistance to the rest of the world. The former supreme leader’s body, aAt the request of Iraqi politicians, Khamenei’s body will also be carried through the Iraqi Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Despite the many posters of Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, walking with his father in a garden, projecting continuity, Mojtaba is not expected to make an appearance at his father’s funeral. He was severely injured in the same US-Israeli strike on a government residence in Tehran at a little after 8am local time on 28 February that killed many of his family. It killed Ali Khamenei, his daughter and her husband, Mojtaba’s wife and his 14-month-old daughter.
The extent of Mojtaba’s injuries are unknown and he has so far issued only written statements, including one that distanced himself from the ceasefire negotiations, but sanctioned their continuance. Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz threatened to kill him this week, saying he was marked for death, remarks that prompted hardliners to call for a re-examination of Iran’s fatwa against possession of nuclear weapons.
