MILLIONS of mourners packed the streets leading to the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad yesterday to bid farewell to the assassinated Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, ahead of his burial.
His body, delayed by unprecedented crowds in Iraq, landed yesterday morning at Mashhad’s Shahid Hasheminejad International Airport, and the burial committee pushed the procession back from 8am to 2pm to accommodate the turnout.
Chanting ‘Labbaik Ya Hussein’ and waving red flags symbolising the call to avenge the blood of martyrs, crowds turned the roads to the shrine into a sea of red, demanding justice for the killing.
Khamenei was assassinated alongside members of his family on 28th February, the first day of the 40-day illegal war of aggression waged by the United States and the Israeli regime against Iran.
The multi-day funeral had opened the previous Friday with his body lying in state in Tehran, before processions through the capital, Qom, and finally Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, where more than seven million people were reported to have taken part.
Thanking Iraq for the reception, Quds Force commander Brigadier General Esmail Qaani said the funeral had brought together ‘Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, and Muslims’ in a display that reflected ‘abhorrence toward global arrogance and international Zionism, as well as a call to avenge the blood of the exalted martyr and all the martyrs of the Muslim world’.
The mourning also reached Lebanon, where Hezbollah secretary general Sheikh Naim Qassem told gatherings on Wednesday that Khamenei had been ‘the guardian of the Muslim world’ who ‘never asked us any favour; we demanded everything, and everything we requested was granted’.
Describing the recent war as ‘a global act of aggression against a country that stood firm alone and thwarted the objectives of aggressors’, Qassem said Iran ‘has managed to defeat the United States and Israel, which failed to achieve their objectives’, emerging ‘with its head held high’.
He turned that defiance toward Beirut, calling for an end to ‘the US tutelage over Lebanon’ and asking: ‘We benefit from our relationship with Iran, but what is the benefit of the relationship with the United States when it humiliates you?’
Citing a strike on Nabatieh al-Fawqa on 6th July that killed four people, including school principal Esperanza Ghandour, he renewed Hezbollah’s total rejection of direct talks with Israel and said no provision of the US-brokered framework agreement signed on 26th June ‘would ultimately pass’, and affirmed the movement’s commitment instead to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran.