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.
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 postwar execution 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.
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."
But some argue that Khamenei's death in the strike on his residence gave the Islamic republic an opportunity to cast him as a sanctified figure and to try to rebuild some of its crumbling legitimacy through a funeral even larger than those held for Khomeini or Soleimani.
Rahmani framed the war itself as bad luck for Iran's political opposition.
"This war in fact rendered many efforts less effective, weakened Iran's middle class considerably, and for now the regime has established authority and fear," he said. Still, he argued that dominance is fragile and could still collapse with the right strategy from opposition forces.
Watch For Mojtaba
The single biggest open question hanging over the week is whether Iran's third supreme leader shows up at all.
Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since the war began in February. No video, audio, or new photograph of him has surfaced since his appointment -- only written statements read aloud on state television.
Even his father-in-law, Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, has said publicly he's had no contact with him and no information about his condition since before the war. Mojtaba didn't even attend the July 2 funeral for his wife, who was killed in the same strike that killed his father.
Officials organizing the funeral have declined to say whether he'll attend.
If he does appear, the moment to watch isn't whether he's somewhere in the crowd -- it's whether he leads the funeral prayer himself. Some observers believe Mojtaba could take it on if he attends, though officials have given no indication either way. Stepping to the front to lead prayers over his own father's body would be the closest thing to a public coronation this succession has had.
