Tens of thousands of Iranians chanted slogans in support of the regime in Tehran on the first day of the supreme leader’s funeral, as the country says farewell to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed more than four months ago in devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes.
The authorities said they expect up to 15 million people to take part over the next six days as the Ayatollah’s coffin is transported across the country.
“Tens of thousands mourn Khamenei as fragile ceasefire holds amid skirmishes in Strait of Hormuz.”
But the funeral comes amid profound change: the old guard has given way to the new, with implications for the region and a fragile ceasefire signed by US President Donald Trump and French President Emanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles last month.
The one-and-a-half-page Memorandum of Understanding, signed during dinner, invited inevitable comparisons with the lengthy 1919 Treaty of Versailles—an agreement that reshaped Europe but left an angry and embittered Germany and set the stage for another global war.
Almost three weeks later, the ceasefire more or less holds, but after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks as precarious as before.
Vali Nasr, professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, said: “This war is much more consequential and larger than we have given it credit for thus far. All major wars of this magnitude ultimately reorder the chess board. This will do it for the Middle East.”
Back in January, Iran was wracked by popular protest which both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted might herald the collapse of the Islamic Republic. The country’s economy was already in tatters after decades of international sanctions, and it was still badly wounded after a 12-day war with the US and Israel six months earlier.
Iran’s nuclear programme, long a diplomatic tool of leverage, had not been obliterated, as Trump boasted, but had been significantly damaged. The whereabouts of its stockpile of uranium, believed to be enough for 10 or 11 atomic weapons if enriched further, was not certain.
The question now is whether the new leaders who have replaced those decapitated in the airstrikes will prove even more formidable foes than their predecessors.