Qom

Qom is Iran's pre-eminent Shia holy city, home to the Shrine of Fatima Masumeh and the largest concentration of Islamic seminaries in the world. The hawza network trains the clerics who staff the Assembly of Experts, The Guardian Council, and the judiciary. The Assembly's headquarters in Qom makes the city constitutionally significant: it is the body that appoints and can dismiss the Supreme Leader.

Qom was struck by US-Israeli forces on 28 February 2026 in the opening salvo of Operation Roaring Lion, alongside Tehran and Isfahan, with the Assembly of Experts headquarters hit directly while the body was convening to choose Khamenei's successor and struck again days later. Three young men were publicly hanged in Qom in March 2026 on charges of waging war against God.

Qom sits at a tension point between sacred authority and political power. Seminary networks retain significant autonomy from the elected government and the IRGC, yet clerics from Qom have historically legitimised, and occasionally constrained, supreme leadership. Striking the Assembly of Experts building in 2026 was read globally as an assault on the doctrinal core of the Islamic Republic. Qom now hosts the second leg of Ali Khamenei's six-day state funeral procession (4-9 July), a symbolic return of his remains to the same clerical seat whose Assembly building was destroyed in the strike that killed him, before burial closes the ceremony at Mashhad's Imam Reza shrine on 9 July.