Ali Khamenei's remains arrived at Mashhad international airport on Thursday, concluding a week-long funeral cycle that began after he and several family members were killed in US-Israeli strikes on Tehran on February 28. His burial at the shrine of Imam Reza — where he had requested to be laid to rest — took place at 2:30pm local time (11:00 GMT), after organizers delayed the ceremony because crowds in Iraq had grown far larger than expected. Al Jazeera

The scale of public mourning has been extraordinary by any modern measure. Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, reported that more than 2.3 million people attended the funeral procession in Najaf alone, while Iranian state media described the Tehran gathering as the largest public assembly in the country's modern history. These figures come from official sources, and as with crowd estimates from state media in authoritarian countries, they resist easy verification — no independent count exists. What is documented is the route: the bodies of Khamenei and four family members were carried through Tehran and Qom, then across the border through Najaf and Kerbala in Iraq, before arriving in Mashhad. Reuters

The ceremony in Tehran, which opened the funeral sequence, ran from roughly 6am to 5pm local time on July 4, according to Iranian state television. Qom held its own rites the following Tuesday. The week-long schedule — spanning five cities across two countries in rapid succession — was partly planned around the Islamic calendar. State media reported that the final burial ritual was timed to coincide with the eve of the death anniversary of Imam Sajjad, the fourth Shia imam, and that organizers waited until ten days of Muharram (the Islamic month of mourning) had passed before beginning the full sequence. IRNA

Threat of further attack hung over the entire week. Iran warned the United States and Israel against launching strikes during the funeral processions, Reuters reported on July 2, and overnight attacks damaged the Tehran-Mashhad railway line ahead of the burial ceremony. Iranian officials told Al Jazeera that despite the strike, the burial ceremony itself proceeded without delay. The situation itself is striking: a government conducting a major state funeral and public mourning under the real possibility of fresh strikes from the same adversaries who killed its leader.

One figure has been conspicuously absent: Mojtaba Khamenei, who took over as supreme leader after his father's death but has not appeared in public since then. Officials have stated he was wounded in the strikes that killed his father, though they have not disclosed how severely he was injured. He did not attend any stage of the funeral processions — not in Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Kerbala, or Mashhad. For Iran's clerical establishment, which depends heavily on visible rituals and continuity to maintain its legitimacy, the new supreme leader's total absence from his predecessor's burial is a conspicuous gap. State media has offered no clear explanation for his non-appearance.

Anger at the United States has been a constant theme throughout the week. Mourners in Mashhad were recorded chanting threats against President Trump, including "I swear by the blood of the supreme leader, Trump, we will kill you" — similar to chants documented during the Tehran procession days earlier. Trump himself has publicly acknowledged the funeral's effect on diplomacy, telling reporters that peace talks with Iran were delayed by a week because of the ceremonies. This was an unusual admission: it suggested negotiations had advanced far enough to be paused rather than simply abandoned.

The funeral served two distinct audiences. Domestically, Iranian state media used the week to project mass national loyalty at a moment when questions about succession, military losses, and the killing of the country's most powerful figure in four decades could easily have exposed divisions or weakness instead. Internationally, state media framed the ceremonies as proof of Iran's regional standing — emphasizing the massive turnout from Iraq's Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Najaf and Kerbala to demonstrate that Tehran's networks of influence across Shia communities remain intact despite the killing of the leader who built them.

But the funeral does not answer the central question now facing Tehran: who actually holds power. A wounded and unseen new supreme leader, combined with a delayed diplomatic track, leaves open whether this week marks closure or merely a pause before the next phase of conflict with Washington and Israel.