The river of black-clad mourners engulfed the Iranian capital Monday, as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rode his coffin through the streets he governed for three decades, to send a message to Washington and Jerusalem: grief here has turned to promise of retribution.

The 86-year-old cleric, who has been the head of the Islamic Republic since 1989, died Feb. 28 in the first hours of the war Israel launched with U.S. against Iran, which also killed several members of his family. His flag-draped coffin, as well as other coffins for relatives who perished in the same blast, was carried on a truck that was decorated to look like the ornamental latticework surrounding the shrine of a Shiite imam. It was a focal point for a six-day mourning period which started on Saturday and will culminate on Thursday with burial at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, where he was born.

By most reports, the crowd was much larger than the estimated one million people who turned out for Qassem Soleimani's funeral in 2020, which was captured by state television's aerial footage and stretched for miles down Azadi Street toward Azadi Square. With Iranians flocking to the capital, the country's metro operator said it had recorded some seven million rides between Saturday night and Sunday morning. No official estimate was released but the idea was certainly the idea; the regime's military command had been weakened and its economy was floundering; the government needed to make a show of mass loyalty and it did just that.

This desire for entertainment was accompanied by genuine risk. Aware of the violence that erupted during the 1989 funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, when what state media said was 10 million people rushed forward to mourn his passing, tearing into his own burial shroud so severely his body hit the ground, organizers had loud speakers warning people to walk slowly and stay on the side of the street. The fire department misted the group to help cool them off during the summer heat. This funeral seemed, if anything, more charged than the other, said a longtime Tehran resident, comparing the two funerals.

The tone in the emotional register was definitely one of revenge and not just of mourning. The mourners held signs that read, "We Will Kill Trump. On the way an effigy of the American president was hung. One bridge's gaggle threw rocks at a billboard depicting Trump with a rifle sight on his head, with the caption: “The US killed our father. We won't let you go.” Speaking on the occasion, a eulogist reportedly told the crowd that it would be "a disgrace" if Khamenei's killer was not killed and mourners took up the chant. One of the women flatly told reporters that she didn't come to bid farewell but to seek revenge. Marchers waved Iranian and Hezbollah flags as well as red banners denoting blood revenge, a gesture that was as much to Washington as to any domestic audience.

Israel's reply came in hours. Defense Minister Israel Katz stated that Khamenei "was assassinated" by Israel because he initiated and spearheaded the effort to eradicate Israel and that “any Iranian leader who attempts to initiate and head a plan to destroy Israel will be thwarted as well.” He likened the crowd's chanting for Trump's death to the “real face” of the regime, and reiterated Israel's capacity to defend itself “unilaterally” “against any threat at any time” even under the current ceasefire. It was Katz who had stated days earlier that the next supreme leader, Khamenei's son and designated successor to his father, Mojtaba Khamenei, was "marked for death" a comment which Iranian security officials reportedly used to justify barricading the next supreme leader from attending his own father's funeral.

The lack of that has now become a story of its own. Installed as supreme leader after his father's death, Mojtaba has not been seen in public since he was injured, reportedly with facial disfigurement, in the same strikes that killed his father, wife and son. Out of fear that any public appearance would invite an Israeli strike, the man now nominally atop Iran's clerical hierarchy, Khamenei, was kept away; three of his other sons, Mostafa, Meysam and Masoud, were seen praying behind the coffins over the weekend, with Masoud wiping away tears with a keffiyeh. The absence of the Iranian leader from the center of the ceremony is viewed by analysts as more than just a security detail: It weakens the idea that the regime is trying to convey of continuity and strength, especially given the most important funeral in decades.

Foreign attendance highlighted the extent to which that message is ‘outward-focused'. There were delegations from across what Tehran calls the Axis of Resistance, as well as envoys from Iraq, Tehran's meeting with Hezbollah and Hamas on the sidelines, and representatives from Russia and Central Asian countries such as Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Notably thin was however the list of actual heads of state, a reflection according to regional analysts of how Tehran's diplomatic isolation has grown, even while Iran is attempting to present itself as part of an alliance network, which remains incomplete after a war that claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people and damaged military bases and infrastructure valued in the billions of dollars.

The story behind the ritual is a more serious economic one, and it here that the timing of the funeral seems least coincidental. The Iranian economy, already weak, was already facing inflation of over 40% in 2025, and food prices have risen even more since then, with prices for bread and cereal up by about 140% year-on-year, cooking oil up by over 200%, and dairy up by nearly 120%, according to tracking of Iran's central bank data, which has been forced to introduce a ten-million-rial banknote the largest denomination ever to keep up with the currency's collapse. The war itself briefly pushed the price of Brent crude up to $120 per barrel as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world's oil trade passes and about 20 percent of the world's liquefied natural gas trade passes as well, where it triggered what the International Energy Agency called “the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market,” as well as a food-security crisis across the Gulf states, which import the bulk of their calories via the same strait.

That pressure is much alleviated with a shaky ceasefire, and more recently, a memorandum of understanding signed June 17. Brent is now back around $73 a barrel, down nearly 40% from the recent wartime peak, when traders are pricing in the possibility of a lasting reopening of Hormuz. The concession was significant: the Treasury granted a blanket 60-day sanctions waiver, General License X, to allow Iran to sell crude, petrochemicals and petroleum products in dollars for the first time in over 40 years, and to unfreeze billions of dollars in Iranian assets previously blocked by the sanctions. The pay-off has been immediate, says Tehran's negotiators, with more than 40 million barrels of crude already exported at prices around 20% higher than before the war began, despite Iran's insistence it will keep sovereign rights over Hormuz when the 60-day window runs out. One energy strategist who is close to the talks put it more starkly, likening it to a ransom demanded to reopen a waterway Iran has essentially taken hostage.

That is the conflict underpinning Monday's show of unity. The very government that's pleading with its citizens to raise their fists in "revenge" is at the same time talking to the citizens of the nation it's calling for revenge against, about how to save its own economy. Washington, in turn, has justified the sanctions relief as a pragmatic approach to crisis management, not concession, since the president has claimed publicly to have acted to prevent what he described as economic catastrophe, rather than to let the standoff over Hormuz continue. But critics in Washington's own foreign-policy community respond that loosening the screws on Iran's oil industry just returns money to a regime that will use it to invest in the same military and regional proxies that are represented by the mourners Monday.

The question is what will happen after Monday, which may or may not depend more on what Iran's new supreme leader does after the funeral ceremonies are over on Thursday in Mashhad. When a leadership is too afraid to show its own head of state in public, while its streets chant for the heads of state opposite to die, it is not necessarily projecting the strength it hopes it is. The week may culminate in true deterrence, lasting economic opportunity, or just a more melodramatic performance of grievance, but, for now, it is an open question that hangs over Tehran.