As Iran grieves for its departed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his funeral cortege arrived at the nation’s most sacred shrine for his interment, with the crowd displaying banners that read, “We Will Kill Trump.”
The series of memorial events for Khamenei has reached its zenith. Notably absent from public appearances, Khamenei’s son and designated successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has stayed out of sight following the February 28th airstrike by the US and Israel that claimed his father’s life, sparking the latest turmoil in the Middle East.
In the city of Mashhad, northeastern Iran, Khamenei’s body was slowly paraded through packed streets on a truck. The procession moved towards the golden domes and minarets of the Shrine of Imam Reza, accompanied by clerics in white turbans. Mourners dressed in black jostled closely behind, waving Iranian flags and holding aloft images of the late leader alongside red placards carrying revolutionary messages.
As the truck couldn’t navigate through the immense throngs, a helicopter completed the journey carrying the coffin for one last short leg. Upon landing, it was placed on a carpet as clerics gathered to offer prayers.
This week, despite an existing truce, tensions with the United States have rekindled. Iran maintains control over the crucial Strait of Hormuz while declaring triumph over enduring a months-long campaign from its formidable adversaries, Israel and the United States.
Iranian authorities are presenting Khamenei’s burial and the huge crowds attending his funeral as evidence of the popularity of their theocratic state and its lasting ideological fire, nearly half a century after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
‘Kill Trump’
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 US and Israel started the war with the strike that killed Ali Khamenei. While he has issued written statements, no image, video or voice recording of him has been issued.
Senior sources in Tehran have said he was injured in the strike and is recovering, but he has not yet been well enough to make public appearances. State security services are also trying to limit his exposure in the event of further attacks from the United States.
As crowds jostled in Mashhad awaiting Khamenei’s funeral cortege, the crowd chanted slogans demanding revenge on US 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 sea of mourners as dusk fell, their defiant chants of “Death to America” ringing out above the lyrical funeral laments and sorrowful string music broadcast by loudspeakers.
Senior ayatollahs sat waiting on a raised dais, under the intricate blue tiling of an arched recess.
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 with its golden dome and another azure domed mosque among Iran’s most recognisable buildings.
As the crowds awaited the coffins of Khamenei and his family in the sweltering July heat, hoses pumped water high into the air to spray across the mourners and keep them cool.
Khamenei’s remains, along with those of four family members, including his 14-month-old granddaugther, killed alongside him, have already been paraded through Tehran, the Shia 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 Shia laments and chanted revolutionary slogans.
Martyrdom holds a central place in the Shia branch of Islam, 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.
Renewed attacks
Meanwhile, Iranian armed forces have launched attacks on US military infrastructure in Gulf states following US strikes on Iran’s southern coastal and eastern provinces, putting further strain on a three-week-old ceasefire agreement.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Navy said the US attacks and intervention in redirecting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz were disrupting the waterway’s gradual reopening.
The Guards said the number of vessels transiting the strait under Iranian supervision had recovered to about 50 per cent of pre-war levels over the past two weeks, adding that permission was being granted only to ships using routes designated by Iran.
Any further US intervention will draw a “crushing response”, the Guards said.
The US military said on Wednesday that its latest strikes were aimed at keeping the Strait open after it said Iranian forces had struck three tankers in the area.
The assault came hours after US President Donald Trump said he believed the interim ceasefire with Iran to be “over”.
While Iran has not claimed responsibility for the ship attacks, analysts say Iran uses such actions to gain leverage in negotiations.
Oil prices, which had spiked amid concerns over the effect of the renewed attacks on shipping and global supplies, fell back on Thursday as investors weighed whether the flare-up was tactical and temporary or might augur a complete collapse in the ceasefire.
Iranian officials said the US attacks had killed 14 people and injured 78 across five provinces on 8 and 9 July.
The Fars news agency said one US strike had hit a rail bridge used for trade with Russia and China.
Several explosions were heard on Thursday morning in Iran’s Bushehr province and in Bandar Abbas, a port city on Iran’s south coast, the Mehr news agency reported.
Bushehr is home to a Russian-built nuclear power plant and a local official later told state media that a US projectile had hit the perimeter area of the facility.
The perimeter had already been hit several times before an 8 April ceasefire.
Iran’s army said in a statement released by state media that it had launched attacks at US Patriot systems in Kuwait, an early-warning site in Qatar and a US army fuel depot in Bahrain.
Kuwait said its armed forces had engaged with a cruise missile, three ballistic missiles and 10 drones in its airspace, and that one person had been injured from falling shrapnel.
Sirens also sounded in Jordan after missiles launched from Iran were detected, the state news agency reported.
Eight were intercepted, with no injuries or damage reported.
The Revolutionary Guards later said Iran had fired 10 ballistic missiles at Jordan’s Azraq military base, which is used by US forces, and also a US military control centre in the Middle East, without elaborating.
Qatar, which hosts the largest US base in the region and has often mediated between the US and its adversaries including Iran, condemned attacks on commercial shipping but also called for a return to diplomacy.
The foreign ministers of Türkiye and Oman also stressed the need to avoid further military escalation in separate calls with their Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi.
In a call with the army chief of Pakistan, which has also mediated in the conflict, Araghchi condemned the United States’ “warmongering policies”.