More than four months after he was killed in the opening strikes of the war with the United States and Israel, Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country for more than three decades with an iron first, is finally being buried.
Starting on July 4, Iran is staging what officials are calling one of the largest, most complex funerals in its history: five days of ceremonies stretching across Tehran, Qom, and Mashhad — with stops in Baghdad, Karbala, and Najaf in neighboring Iraq — before his body reaches its final resting place at the Imam Reza shrine on July 9.
The event is expected to have the scale of pageantry usually reserved for founding figures, but having ruled Iran for nearly 37 years, Khamenei leaves as the Islamic republic’s longest-serving supreme leader and a defining force in Iran’s modern history.
The drawn-out affair, according to Taghi Rahmani, a rights activist and husband of Nobel Peace Prize Winner Narges Mohammadi, is designed as a show of the state “still standing” and reasserting itself after the war. It will also attempt to gloss over the deaths of tens of thousands of Iranians at the hands of Khamenei’s regime.
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Rahmani added that the Islamic republic is trying to project strength both to foreign audiences and domestically, through fear and authority, even as he says the gap between the state and Iranian society is vast — a population he described as impoverished, weakened, repressed, and resentful, but also cowed by a postwarexecution wave.
Why Now, And Why Like This
The funeral was supposed to happen in March, not long after he was killed on February 28. It didn’t, and the reasons for the delay tell their own story about the state Iran finds itself in.
Plans were revised repeatedly in the immediate aftermath of Khamenei’s death since the country was still at war. So, officials weighed security threats, uncertainty over foreign attendance, and an unresolved succession question.
What emerged instead was a body kept in storage for months while the Islamic republic tried to figure out how to bury its second supreme leader without the ceremony collapsing into chaos or becoming a flashpoint itself.
People walk past a billboard depicting the founder of the Islamic republic and its first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on a street in Tehran on June 6.
Security is now the dominant concern, with sources telling RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that there is heightened security around Tehran’s Mosala prayer grounds, where the funeral procession will begin.
Planners are also trying to avoid a repeat of two infamous disasters: The crush that killed eight and injured thousands at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral in 1989, and the stampede that killed scores at General Qassem Soleimani’s burial in 2020. Provincial officials in Khorasan Razavi, where Khamenei will be interred, have floated using helicopters to manage crowds around the casket.
Khomeini’s funeral also saw thousands of mourners rushing toward the casket of the Islamic republic’s founder, causing his shroud-wrapped body to roll out. Organizers will certainly want to avoid a repeat of that.
The Reckoning
The staging can’t fully paper over what Khamenei’s rule actually meant for the people being asked to mourn him.
For over three decades he sat atop a system that treated dissent as foreign conspiracy and answered it with deadly force — from the 2009 Green Movement to the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising to the deadly protest wave that broke out just weeks before the war began.
So it’s not surprising that, among many others, the families of protesters killed by security forces celebrated Khamenei’s death in the war, despite the conflict fueling fear and anxiety in society.
“I felt that justice had prevailed over oppression,” Moslem Haqiqi, whose son Milan Haqiqi was killed in 2022, told Radio Farda. “It brought some comfort to the wounds that had weighed heavily on my heart for years.”
