DUBAI (Reuters) — The body of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lay in state in a vast hall in Tehran on Friday as clerics, officials, foreign dignitaries and other mourners paid their respects to Iran’s late Supreme Leader, who was killed in the opening Israeli-American airstrikes of the war against Iran on February 28.

Iran is staging a week of mass funeral processions for Khamenei, who held power for 37 years, in a show of public devotion to the Islamic Republic’s theocratic state and revolutionary zeal.

Khamenei’s body is expected to be taken to Qom, Najaf and Kerbala, the great Shi’ite centres of Iran and Iraq, before being laid to rest on Thursday in Mashhad, home to the country’s holiest pilgrimage shrine.

His coffin was unveiled late on Thursday to a throng of sobbing supporters, swaying and beating their heads in time to a sung lament as flowers were thrown from the bier into the crowd. On Friday, the coffin — and those of family members killed with him — was laid in state in the great prayer hall built to honour his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The funeral is taking place at a critical moment for Iran, where the clerical rulers backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are riding high from surviving what they saw as an existential war against their greatest and most powerful foes.

But nearly five decades after the 1979 revolution, and for all the official proclamations of national unity in the run-up to Khamenei’s funeral, the Islamic Republic has rarely been so internally fractured.

Support for the clerical leadership is paper-thin, analysts say, and the new Supreme Leader, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in any new image since being wounded in the strike that killed his father.

Years of crippling sanctions have paralysed the economy as accelerating bouts of mass nationwide protests have been put down by security forces with increasing force — culminating in the killing of thousands of demonstrators in January.

Those........

© The Times of Israel