Hundreds of thousands of mourners filled the streets of the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala on Wednesday, chanting, praying and weeping for Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as they pushed their way to the convoy carrying his coffin.
It was a frenzied outpouring of grief for another nation’s ruler — one who, as a pre-eminent Shiite Muslim cleric and political strategist, spent decades extending Iran’s influence deep into Iraq, and across the Middle East.
“He was our guardian and protector, and we are here today to return the favor,” said Rabab Jassim, a 45-year old homemaker, who arrived in Najaf at 3 a.m. from Baghdad to join the ceremony. “My heart is on fire,” she said, bursting into tears.
The procession followed five days of funeral services and mass mourning inside Iran for Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed in the first U.S.-Israeli strikes that launched the war on Iran in February. His body was set to be flown back to Iran after the commemorations, and he was expected to be buried on Thursday in his hometown, the northeastern city of Mashhad.
As supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei oversaw brutal crackdowns of opposition to his clerical rule at home, and he also leaves behind a divisive legacy in Iraq.
The country is home to the Middle East’s second-largest Shiite Muslim population, after Iran. Some Iraqis praise Ayatollah Khamenei for providing Iranian support to Iraq’s Shiite militias, who fought against the eight-year U.S. occupation. Others blame Iran’s intervention for stoking two decades of sectarian bloodshed with Iraq’s Sunni minority that has only recently ebbed.
People from all over Iraq have spent days awaiting the commemorations in Najaf and Karbala, home to two of Shiite Islam’s holiest sites.
Some came from even farther afield: Among the crowds were Nigerian women, holding up their babies; Lebanese mourners draped in the yellow flag of the Iranian-backed militant group, Hezbollah; and Yemenis wearing traditional scarves and daggers.
“I chose to come here, instead of Iran, because this is a much more powerful religious experience, standing at our holiest sites,” Samir Rabyani, a medic from Sanaa, Yemen, said. “Khamenei died a martyr. And no matter how many of us they martyr, we will be the victors.”
The crowds, drenched in sweat after walking for hours in searing temperatures, turned into a crush as mourners tried to follow the coffin into Najaf’s golden-domed Imam Ali shrine. They trampled soldiers to force their way inside, and mourners who fainted had to be carried out on others’ shoulders.
There is little historic precedent for one country holding an official funeral for the leader of another nation, as Iraq’s top officials did on Tuesday evening, when the ayatollah’s coffin arrived in the country. That makes the event as unusual as it is symbolically potent.
“Iraq is the holy land of the Shiite faith, and this is an attempt by Iran to underscore Khamenei as belonging not just to Iran, but to the broader Shiite community,” said Arash Azizi, a New York-based historian and author of several books on Iran.
It was also a political message, projecting the reach that Iran and its allies claim still to have.
For the past three years, the United States and Israel have sought to dismantle the network of mostly Shiite militant groups that Iran cultivated during Ayatollah Khamenei’s nearly 37-year rule.
Among those groups is Hezbollah in Lebanon, which Israel has been at war with, and the Houthi militants in Yemen, against whom the Trump administration fought a short-lived campaign. Since June 2025, the United States and Israel have also started two wars on Iran itself, battering but failing to topple the country’s Shiite theocracy.
In Iraq, Tehran maintains its alliances with many Shiite militias, and the funeral is a sign that those bonds are far from broken. Iran’s resilience in the recent war even emboldened those militias enough to hold a procession for Ayatollah Khamenei in Iraq — a regional ally of the United States.
“The message here is that we defied the world: America, Israel, and the great global powers,” said Ali Ramadan, a fighter in an Iraqi Shiite militia who had brought his family of four to Najaf for the funeral.
“We are with justice, and we are with Iran,” Mr. Ramadan added. “Khamenei stood for truth against imperialism.”
The ayatollah’s coffin, draped in an Iranian flag and encased in glass, was escorted by a procession of trucks emblazoned with the words, “By god, rise up.” By evening in Karbala, so many people had packed the streets that the procession had slowed to a crawl on its way to the Imam Hussein and al-Abbas shrines, festooned with strings of glowing red lights.
“No one can humiliate us,” the mourners chanted in unison, while a speaker at the procession shouted, “We take pride in our tears as we mourn your coffin.”
Thousands of Iraqis camped out overnight in the streets of Najaf and Karbala to await the processions — enduring temperatures that topped 90 degrees before sunrise.
Some had pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei pinned to their chests, while others waved Iranian and Iraqi flags. Iraqi tribesmen chanted and danced their way through the crowds. Older participants hobbled up to the procession routes with canes, as militia fighters sprawled out in the shade below bridges.
Iranian and Iraqi officials have made the funeral in Iraq an exercise in modern-day mythmaking, repeatedly comparing Ayatollah Khamenei to figures in Shiite Islam’s most sacred stories.
Along the procession routes in Karbala, Ayatollah Khamenei’s face was emblazoned on black-and-red banners commemorating Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. Hussein’s martyrdom in the 680 A.D. battle of Karbala is a central theme of Shiite Islam, representing the willingness to fight tyranny in the face of certain death.
Iranian officials and Iraqi mourners have likened Ayatollah Khamenei to a modern-day Hussein, and the United States and Israel to the story’s tyrant.
“He fought for justice. And what happened to him is what happened to Hussein,” said Abbas Jassim, a 26-year old security guard, who had tied an Iranian flag around his shoulders like a cape. He was so eager to reach the funeral in Karbala, he said, he sold his daughter’s earrings to afford the bus fare from Baghdad.
“I would now sacrifice my soul for Iran,” he said. “And I reached that point because of my love for Ali Khamenei.”
Many Iraqi Shiites, remember Ayatollah Khamenei most for being the first leader who sent weapons and support to help Iraq fight back against the jihadist forces of the Islamic State, or ISIS, in 2014. The Islamic State, a Sunni militant group, seized swaths of Iraq, slaughtering many Shiites as they advanced.
Most mourners said that stood foremost in their minds when they decided to attend the commemorations for Ayatollah Khamenei.
“I lost a dear friend to ISIS, and that was like losing the ribs that protect your heart,” said Ibrahim Enad, a 30-year-old engineer, tearing up. “We cannot forget the Iranian stance toward Iraq. In all of our crises, they have never abandoned us.”
Falih Hassan and Shirin Hakim contributed reporting.
July 8, 2026
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An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of an interviewee, Ali Ramadan. He was in the Iraqi city of Najaf, not Karbala.
