Iranians Turn Out In mass To Mourn President Raisi

Thousands of Iranians turned out to mourn President Ebrahim Raisi in the city of Tabriz on Tuesday, after he was killed in a helicopter crash near the Azerbaijan border at the weekend along with his foreign minister and seven others.

State TV broadcast live images of mourners, many of them dressed in black, beating their chests while a truck covered in white flowers carrying the caskets wrapped in the national flag was driven slowly through the crowd.

“Everyone has come to bid farewell to the martyred president and his companions regardless of their faction, ethnicity or language,” said Tabriz lawmaker Masoud Pezeshkian.

However, although state TV said a large crowd appeared in Tabriz, some insiders see a stark contrast in public grief compared with past commemorations for the deaths of other senior figures in the Islamic Republic’s 45-year history.

While Iran proclaimed five days of mourning for Raisi, there was little of the emotional rhetoric that accompanied the death of Qasem Soleimani, a senior commander of the elite Revolutionary Guards killed by a U.S. missile in 2020 in Iraq, whose funeral drew huge crowds of mourners, weeping with sorrow and rage.

Raisi’s body was flown from Tabriz, the closest major city to the remote crash site, to Tehran airport before heading to the holy Shi’ite Muslim city of Qom. From there, it will return to the capital to lie at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla Mosque before being transferred to his hometown of Mashahd, in eastern Iran, for burial on Thursday.

Mourners carried posters bearing images of Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the Friday prayer leader of Tabriz city and other officials who were also killed in the crash.

Reuters/Shakirat Sadiq