Funeral ceremonies for Iran’s late supreme Lleader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have begun in the Iraqi city of Najaf, which is sacred to Shia Muslims.<\/p>\n
A funeral procession set off early on Wednesday, with local reports suggesting that hundreds of thousands of people turned out.<\/p>\n
Among those taking part in the procession were Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and senior religious and political leaders from Iraq.<\/p>\n
Iraq’s Prime Minister Ali al-Saidi had received Khamenei’s body the previous evening.<\/p>\n
The so-called Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an alliance of predominantly Shia militias in Iraq loyal to Iran, reported that more than 2 million people had turned out for the funeral procession in Najaf.<\/p>\n
There was no confirmation of the figures from other sources, but images showed enormous crowds.<\/p>\n
The majority of Iraqis are Shia. Their heartland lies around their holy sites of Najaf and Karbala, south of the capital Baghdad.<\/p>\n
Iraq and Iran are today linked by close religious, political and economic ties, and Tehran wields considerable influence in Iraq.<\/p>\n
Following a funeral prayer in Najaf, a funeral procession followed by prayers was also planned in Karbala.<\/p>\n
Khamenei is due to be buried on Thursday in his hometown of Mashhad after days of processions across Iran and Iraq.<\/p>\n
The late leader was killed on February 28 in an Israeli airstrike on his official residence in Tehran.<\/p>\n
The US and Israel subsequently waged war against Iran for more than five weeks, until representatives from Washington and Tehran agreed on a ceasefire in early April.<\/p>\n
However, despite the ceasefire and a framework agreement to end the war, there have been several instances of further attacks by both sides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Funeral ceremonies for Iran’s late supreme Lleader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have begun in the Iraqi city of Najaf,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[14],"tags":[327,56130,46624,34,1796,94,7099,58147],"class_list":["post-196123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iraq","tag-ali-khamenei","tag-funeral-ceremonies","tag-funeral-procession","tag-iran","tag-iranian-supreme-leader","tag-iraq","tag-najaf","tag-procession-route"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116884132605360402","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}