A memorial site established near the Tehran street where Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed has been closed after a group of ultra-hardline activists seized control of the compound, transforming it into a political protest camp and exposing a deepening rift within Iran's loyalist camp, Iran International reported.
The mourning site, set up near the location where Khamenei was killed, was shut down after shroud-wearing ultra-hardliners turned it into a three-day sit-in, exposing a widening rift inside Iran's loyalist camp over how to use the slain leader's memory.
The site had been established as an official prayer and mourning compound on Jomhuri Street in central Tehran, near where Khamenei was eliminated during Operation Lion's Roar. It was closed after a group of extremist activists from the city of Mashhad arrived dressed in white burial shrouds, a charged religious symbol in Iran meant to signal willingness to die for a cause. The group, known as the "shroud-wearers," refused to leave for three consecutive days despite repeated requests from the site's official organizers, erecting what amounted to a semi-military encampment with overnight stays, independent food distribution, and stored protest equipment. The organizers said they closed the site to "protect its sanctity," though political analysts characterized the closure as a distinctly political move.
The crisis lays bare a fracture that has been building for weeks within the Islamic Republic's hardline base. The dispute is not between regime opponents and supporters, but between competing factions within the loyalist camp itself, over how Khamenei's death should be politically deployed.
The death of Ali Khamenei was expected to usher in a delicate transition. Instead, the early days of Mojtaba Khamenei's leadership suggest the regime has entered a new phase of internal instability, where disputes once confined behind closed doors are increasingly surfacing in public.
On one side stands the official establishment led by President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, which seeks to manage the mourning period as a symbol of national unity and continuity, particularly as sensitive diplomatic negotiations with Washington over the MOU framework remain ongoing. On the other stands the ultra-conservative "Paydari Front" faction, which is demanding that Khamenei's memory be weaponized as a pressure campaign against anyone it views as insufficiently hardline, including senior negotiators. Radical activists have publicly called for the execution of Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Ghalibaf on charges of "betraying the leader's blood," and authorities have been forced to bar the ultra-conservative faction from official state-organized memorial events in Tehran.
The episode has also turned the regime's own religious messaging against it. In the weeks following Khamenei's killing, official Iranian media invested heavily in sacred language to describe the site, at one point comparing it to Zainabiyeh, a site of profound significance in Shia Islam. That rhetoric has now boomeranged: the ultra-hardliners are deploying the same martyrdom and sacrifice terminology to delegitimize the Pezeshkian government and torpedo the diplomatic process, putting Tehran's new leadership in the uncomfortable position of having to shut down a site it itself declared holy.
