TIGHT security was seen manning the streets of Tehran on Friday (July 3), ahead of a planned farewell ceremony for former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran's ruling clerics are preparing days of mass funeral rites for Khamenei as a show of public devotion to the Islamic Republic and proof that its revolutionary fervor still burns strong.
Iran's supreme leader was killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes in their first attack of the war and the funeral events will begin over the weekend in Tehran, with mass processions planned next week in Qom and Mashhad and ceremonies in Iraq.
Khamenei's death, and the succession of his son Mojtaba as Iran's third supreme leader, in a conflict with its greatest foes, mark an epochal moment in the Islamic Republic's 47-year history. Mojtaba, dangerously wounded in the strike that killed his father, has not been seen in any new image since the war began.
On Saturday (July 4), Khamenei's remains will be taken to a Tehran mosque for the first stop in a national funerary tour. The bodies of his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, as well as the widow of the new leader, his son Mojtaba, who were all killed in the same strike, will be carried alongside.
