Ayatollah Khamenei has been dead for a while, but his funeral will take place tomorrow. Reportedly the funeral needed to await a truce agreement between Iran and the U.S. Perhaps the timing–July 4–is coincidental. The Telegraph headlines: “Supreme leader’s funeral expected to draw 20 million Iranians to streets of Tehran.”
Around 20 million Iranians are expected to pack the streets of Tehran for the funeral of Ali Khamenei, the country’s former supreme leader, this weekend.
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Authorities have urged the public to attend en masse, and police have predicted a turnout in Tehran of up to 17 million. The city’s mayor said he was expecting up to 20 million.Nationwide, officials estimate between that 18 and 35 million will attend events across Tehran, Qom, Mashhad, and the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.
If 18 to 35 million Iranians turn out to mourn Khamenei, maybe the regime isn’t as unpopular as I thought.
It is unknown whether the current Ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, will show up for his father’s funeral, making his first public appearance since he was grievously wounded (or worse) during the early days of the bombing.
The funeral is said to be exposing the rift that exists in Iran’s leadership:
The funeral is being held amid feuding in the Islamic Republic over the new peace deal with Washington. It has been provocatively scheduled to coincide with the US’s Independence Day.
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One MP’s warning of a possible coup has further unsettled the political scene, deepening a sense of a fractured system.Kamran Ghazanfari alleged that officials were quietly paying eulogists and preachers to abandon nightly street gatherings, and that letters had gone to the Basij militia ordering it to stop supporting them – an effort, he said, to let the mobilisation “fade and then be shut down”.
He framed it as “a semi-political coup against the leader of the system”, accusing the camp of Masoud Pezeshkian, the president, of inflating the role of the supreme national security council.
The claims are unverified and show the hardliners’ world view, but they reveal the real fault line beneath the funeral – control of the streets.
Control of Iran’s streets is indeed the issue, and it continues to appear that whatever faction of the regime winds up on top will be in charge where it counts.
