TEHRAN, July 4: — Hundreds of thousands of mourners began a dayslong funeral Saturday for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, beating their chests in sorrow before the glass case containing his flag-draped coffin in Tehran and calling for revenge against Israel and the United States.
The funeral for Khamenei, who ruled Iran for decades before being killed at age 86 in a February 28 airstrike in the opening moments of the Iran war, could provide a boost for the country’s theocracy and its new supreme leader, his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.
That is particularly important as Iran tries to leverage its hold on the Strait of Hormuz in negotiations with the US over a permanent end to the war and as concern still lingers that Israel could attack yet again.
During the ceremony, Iran’s top negotiator issued a warning to France and the United Kingdom over their comments about potentially launching joint patrols in the waterway, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of all oil and natural gas once passed in peacetime.
Funeral starts as US marks its 250th anniversary
Iran chose July 4, the 250th anniversary of the creation of the US, to begin the funeral. While authorities did not acknowledge the timing, crowds at the ceremony in Tehran chanted: “Death to America!” The refrain has been common in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and US Embassy takeover and hostage crisis. They also cried: “Death to Israel!”
“We knocked the hell out of Iran,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a speech at the same time in South Dakota in front of Mount Rushmore. “They want to settle so badly. We gave them a week off for a funeral.”
The American president was not forgotten in Tehran. In the crowd in Grand Mosalla, several mourners held a large flag that read: “#KillTrump.”
As the ceremony went on, Iran’s chief negotiator Kazem Gharibabadi criticised a joint statement overnight from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, which suggested their militaries stood ready to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. (AP)
