Tehran

Tehran was struck on the opening night of Operation Roaring Lion on 28 February 2026, with Israel killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in his compound alongside IRGC Aerospace headquarters, 30 fuel depots, Mehrabad airport and the Shahran oil refinery . HRANA counted 1,407 civilian dead including 214 children. The city had no public bomb shelters and no air raid siren system. Mojtaba Khamenei was installed as Supreme Leader on 8 March in the first dynastic succession in the office's history, making Tehran the seat of a contested wartime government operating through two parallel power centres: Araghchi's Foreign Ministry and Vahidi's IRGC.

The fracture became visible on 19 April, when Tehran produced three contradictory official positions in a single day: Ghalibaf told reporters negotiations showed progress; Baqaei declared enriched uranium "as sacred as Iranian soil" ; and Tasnim denounced a Reuters Ceasefire report as US psychological operations. By 11 May, Foreign Minister Araghchi was conducting back-to-back meetings with Turkish, Egyptian and Dutch counterparts in Tehran while state television broadcast Ceasefire-collapse framing.

On 21-22 June, Tehran dispatched a delegation to the Switzerland round at Burgenstock: Araghchi led on the diplomatic track, and Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf attended as the institutional guarantor, his presence a signal that the Majlis would not immediately override whatever the general-officer channel produced. Ghalibaf refused the group photograph and gave no joint press conference after Trump's mid-session threats, and Iran's delegation briefly walked out before returning. The city from which the delegation travelled remains the seat of the IRGC's Khatam al-Anbia HQ, which separately declared Hormuz closed on 20 June, underlining the dual-government tension that Tehran embodies: diplomats negotiating in Geneva while the corps prosecutes its own leverage from the same capital .

On 4 July, Ali Khamenei's state funeral opened in Tehran, six weeks after the strike that killed him; Mojtaba Khamenei did not appear, with officials giving no reason and Western reporting pointing to a standing Israeli assassination threat and unhealed injuries from that same February strike . Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif attended in person as the most senior head of government present; no Western government sent a delegation. The cortege then moved from Tehran through Qom to Najaf, where Iraq's president received it on foreign soil for the first time, before onward burial at Mashhad . At Qom on 7 July, senior marja Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi-Amoli led prayers beside the coffin, supplying the religious authority Mojtaba lacks under Article 109 of the constitution, after the Assembly of Experts had boycotted part of his March appointment over his want of full marja credentials .

Tehran is Iran's capital and largest city, home to roughly nine million people in the city and 14 million in the wider province. It houses the Supreme Leader's compound, the IRGC's central headquarters, the Assembly of Experts, the Majlis, Evin Prison and state broadcaster IRIB. The city sits on the southern slope of the Alborz mountains at roughly 1,200 metres above sea level, giving it a distinctive climate and making it the country's administrative, political, financial and cultural nerve-centre. Tehran's concentration of governmental power means that whoever controls it (or holds the institutions within it) controls Iran. The city has been the seat of every Supreme Leader since the Islamic Republic's founding in 1979 and the command post for every major external crisis the republic has faced.