The lengthy funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s former supreme leader, has been an elaborate and extended spectacle projecting strength, national unity, stability, continuity and vengeance after two successive wars with the United States and Israel within a year.

Iran’s uncompromising message is mainly directed at the U.S., whose military bases in the region it seeks to remove; Israel, whose very existence it wants to snuff out, and Arab Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, whose alliance with the United States it hopes to demolish.

These themes have been present at Khamenei’s nation-wide funeral, an exercise in defiance.

Khamenei, 86, and several members of his family were killed in joint U.S. and Israeli air strikes on his heavily-guarded compound in central Tehran on February 28, the first day of the second war. Iran’s political and military leadership was all but decimated during these bombardments, allowing a new generation of leaders to take over.

Mojtaba Khamenei, one of his sons and his successor, was severely injured in the attack, which ignited a war that badly degraded Iran’s armed forces, smashed its defence industries, and knocked out much of its nuclear facilities, including three uranium enrichment plants.

Despite its ignominious defeat, the theocratic regime did not buckle and survived, surprising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump.

On the basis of a Mossad assessment, Netanyahu had assured Trump that the Islamic regime was weaker than at any point since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and was therefore vulnerable.

Almost two months before the outbreak of the war, which erupted nearly a year after the 12-day conflict in June 2025, Iran was convulsed by widespread and sustained anti-government........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)