Iran holds state funeral for top brass slain in war with Israel
TEHRAN: Iran began a state funeral service Saturday for around 60 people, including its military commanders, killed in its war with Israel, after Tehran's top diplomat condemned Donald Trump's comments on supreme leader Ali Khamenei as 'unacceptable'.
The proceedings started at 8:00 am local time (0430 GMT) in the capital Tehran as government offices and many businesses were closed on Saturday for the occasion.
'The ceremony to honour the martyrs has officially started,' state TV said, showing footage of people donning black clothes, waving Iranian flags and holding pictures of the slain military commanders.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian as well as other senior government officials also attended the event.
Images showed coffins draped in Iranian flags and bearing portraits of the deceased commanders in uniform near Enghelab Square in central Tehran.
The United States had carried out strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last weekend, joining its ally Israel's bombardments of Iran's nuclear programme in the 12-day conflict launched on June 13.
Both Israel and Iran claimed victory in the war that ended with a ceasefire, with Iranian leader Khamenei downplaying the US strikes as having done 'nothing significant'.
In a tirade on his Truth Social platform, Trump blasted Tehran Friday for claiming to have won the war.
Trump says would bomb Iran again if nuclear activities start
He also claimed to have known 'EXACTLY where he (Khamenei) was sheltered, and would not let Israel, or the U.S. Armed Forces… terminate his life'.
'I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, 'THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!'' the US leader said.
Trump added he had been working in recent days on the possible removal of sanctions against Iran, one of Tehran's main demands.
'But no, instead I get hit with a statement of anger, hatred, and disgust, and immediately dropped all work on sanction relief, and more,' Trump said.
Hitting back at Trump Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi condemned the Republican president's comments on Khamenei.
'If President Trump is genuine about wanting a deal, he should put aside the disrespectful and unacceptable tone towards Iran's Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei,' Araghchi posted on social media platform X.
'The Great and Powerful Iranian People, who showed the world that the Israeli regime had NO CHOICE but to RUN to 'Daddy' to avoid being flattened by our Missiles, do not take kindly to Threats and Insults.'
The Israeli strikes on Iran killed at least 627 civilians, Tehran's health ministry said. Iran's attacks on Israel killed 28 people, according to Israeli figures.
'Historic' state funeral
The ceremony in Tehran 'to honour the martyrs' will be followed by a funeral procession to Azadi Square, about 11 kilometres (seven miles) across the sprawling metropolis.
Iran says IAEA chief request to visit bombed sites suggests 'malign intent'
Mohsen Mahmoudi, head of Tehran's Islamic Development Coordination Council, vowed it would be a 'historic day for Islamic Iran and the revolution'.
Among the dead is Mohammad Bagheri, a major general in Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the second-in-command of the armed forces after the Iranian leader.
He will be buried alongside his wife and daughter, a journalist for a local media outlet, all killed in an Israeli attack.
Nuclear scientist Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, also killed in the attacks, will be buried with his wife.
Revolutionary Guards commander Hossein Salami, who was killed on the first day of the war, will also be laid to rest after Saturday's ceremony – which will also honour at least 30 other top commanders.
Of the 60 people who are to be laid to rest after the ceremony, four are children.
'Imminent threat'
During his first term in office, Trump pulled out in 2018 of a landmark nuclear deal – negotiated by former US president Barack Obama.
The deal that Trump had abandoned aimed to make it practically impossible for Iran to build an atomic bomb, while at the same time allowing it to pursue a civil nuclear programme.
Iran, which insists its nuclear programme is only for civilian purposes, stepped up its activities after Trump withdrew from the agreement.
After the US strikes, Trump said negotiations for a new deal were set to begin next week.
But Tehran denied a resumption, and leader Khamenei said Trump had 'exaggerated events in unusual ways', rejecting US claims Iran's nuclear programme had been set back by decades.
Israel had claimed it had 'thwarted Iran's nuclear project' during the 12-day war.
But its foreign minister reiterated Friday the world was obliged to stop Tehran from developing an atomic bomb.
'The international community now has an obligation to prevent, through any effective means, the world's most extreme regime from obtaining the most dangerous weapon,' Gideon Saar wrote on X.
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Listen to article The Iran-Israel short war of ballistic missile exchanges and air strikes is over. Yet the context under which this short war was fought had a deep effect on how independent states view the existing international environment. The challenge for the great powers, the regional hegemons and the medium and the ordinary powers that rally around them is simple: can this international environment in which international norms and laws are violated be allowed to endure? Does it need restructuring or can it be left unchanged? In the case of former there is all the likelihood of another sovereign state being bullied and attacked by a ruthless power; and in the case of latter the setting of a similar event can be prevented and unjust attacks on sovereign states may be stopped from reoccurring. Contextually, there is a greater realisation in the world that terrorism is being used as a pretext by individual states to further their national interests. 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The victim scale that had long been tilted in India's favour seems to be settling back in the balance and the US may have set the future global trend of no more viewing Pakistan from the Indian position of blaming Pakistan as a terrorist state. Add to this the recent diplomatic setback that India suffered in the meeting of the Defence Ministers in Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), when the Indian defence minister refused to sign a draft of joint statement which omitted a reference to the 22 April Pahalgam terror attack in occupied Kashmir. If there was evidence that India could share with the rest of the participating countries, surely the Indian position would have been strong in advocating the inclusion of this terrorist attack in the draft of the joint statement. Pakistan has consistently maintained the absence of such evidence and also maintained a consistent diplomatic posture that encouraged India to hold bilateral dialogue. But India believes more in bullying and subjugating Pakistan rather than treating it as an equal. In case of Israel, no American President has used the language that President Trump used when Israel violated the ceasefire agreement of which he was a guarantor. There is no doubt that President Trump is the most pro-Israel president that America ever had but when it came to the possibility of American interests being hurt, President Trump sounded determined to force Israel to change its behaviour against Iran. Tested and jolted by recent events, the international environment is not likely to remain the same. Wars are being fought in a manner unknown in previous history and how the nation states will change and adjust will determine what kind of international environment will prevail as we approach 2050. The lead up to 2050 and the pathway that leads the world there cannot be discussed without mentioning the role of the other three great powers in determining how the world travels on this pathway. Recent events prove that the US has failed to make the world safe. It has failed to construct the rules-based system in which international laws could be respected and it has also failed to ensure that states cooperate and not engage in conflicts. In case of America, it is sufficient to say that its thesis of end of history has not ended. The coming back of history is the new antithesis and under the return of great power competition this antithesis will be written by China and Russia. How America brought the world to the ending notion of its liberal order of internationalism is a topic that requires detailed answering and needs to be dealt with in a separate space and time. Here I would just like to conclude by giving some of the assumptions on how the world and the international system that runs it may be restructured given the context under which the recent wars have been fought. Dynastic politics will be on the decline and nation states ideas of freedom and liberty will not remain the same. More and more nationalism will hatch as authoritarianism will mate more frequently with ending civil liberties as more and more military preparedness will demand quashing of domestic dissent as national economies will reorganise to equip their militaries to adjust against the shifting military capabilities between the states and to maintain the fracturing balance of power. Military preparedness will trump political mindsets and create military mindsets and eventually more and more military states. Russophobia and China-phobia are considered as the greatest geopolitical threat of 21st Century. These two diseases from which the West suffers will contribute to how these great powers will challenge the international system together with the states that will rally around them. The US will regret mistreating the twenty-six years of unipolarity (1991-2017) by favouring realistic and militaristic foreign policy in promoting the order of liberal internationalism that only backfired. Disastrous foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran is what constituted the current international system of chaos and anarchy and which is hardly what the world deserved as America led it as a sole superpower. Nation states will no longer tolerate being at the centre of any American intrigue. Autocracies will demand intellectual climate that should support nationalism as guns will be preferred over butter in a national environment in which military preparedness will be expedited. States either grow or decay but in a reordered world fashioned by the Indian and Israeli military aggression most states will neither grow nor decay, they will spend more time, effort and resources to stay where they are as growth of militarism and not socialism will become the order of the day.
