Iran concluded three days of public mourning in Tehran with a large, carefully choreographed funeral procession for its assassinated supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and four family members killed in Israeli-American air strikes on 28 February. The event, drawing millions of mourners along a 10km route, was staged by the country's new leadership as a political spectacle designed to project themes of resistance and revenge to a watching world, underlining Iran's defiance following the war and the loss of a founding figure of its 1979 revolution.

Crowds wearing black and waving red flags of martyrdom chanted "death to America" and "death to Israel", with some mourners and posters singling out US President Donald Trump for retribution. Yet many Iranians stayed away, angered by two wars in under a year, roughly 80% inflation, and a deadly crackdown on January's anti-government protests. As commemorations move to holy sites in Qom and to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, before a final burial in Mashhad, Iran's new leaders face pressure to keep negotiating with the US to ease sanctions. The country now enters a new era under its third supreme leader, 56-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not appeared in public since being injured in the strikes that killed his father.