16MAY

Mourning and fireworks on Iran streets

3 min read

12:41UTC

While Western cameras fixated on celebrations, pro-regime mourning crowds also gathered across Iran — a country too divided for any single image to represent.

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Key takeaway

The coexistence of mourning and celebration crowds in Iran reflects a genuine societal fracture rather than a unified national response, and will shape the political landscape of whatever comes next.

Pro-regime mourning crowds gathered across Iran in the hours after Khamenei's death was confirmed , a parallel reality to the fireworks and 'Death to Khamenei' chants in Tehran, Karaj, Borazjan, and Mamasani (ID:474). Western broadcasters led overwhelmingly with the celebrations. The mourners received less airtime. Both were real.

The Islamic Republic has never lacked a domestic constituency. The Basij and IRGC employ or subsidise millions of families. The bonyads — revolutionary foundations controlling an estimated 20% of Iran's GDP — distribute patronage deep into provincial towns and rural communities. Religious conservatives in Qom, Mashhad, and the smaller shrine cities hold genuine reverence for the velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist that Khamenei embodied. A framework that treats 87 million Iranians as a monolithic bloc awaiting liberation has failed every time it has been tested — in 1953, in 2003 next door, in 2011 across the Arab world.

Separating genuine grief from orchestrated display is impossible under current conditions. The IRGC's reported deployment of armed members on motorbikes through Tehran — cited by Middle East Eye from unverified sources — means mourning crowds gathered under the watch of the same apparatus that killed an estimated 36,000 protesters in January . A crowd assembled under visible armed surveillance is not the same as one assembled freely, and no camera resolves that ambiguity.

Iran is fighting two simultaneous crises: external military attack and internal state fracture. The National Security Council's instruction for Tehran residents to evacuate, the empty supermarket shelves in northern Tehran, and the IRGC's street patrols all indicate the security apparatus considers domestic control at least as urgent as the foreign threat. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the Khomeini government weaponised external conflict to consolidate internal power. Whether a decapitated state can execute the same manoeuvre is the open question.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

When news of Khamenei's death spread, Iran did not react as one. In some parts of the country, people set off fireworks, took to the streets in joy, and celebrated what they saw as the fall of a repressive regime. In other parts, people gathered to mourn — whether out of genuine grief, religious duty, or fear of what happens next. Both crowds are real. This is not a country that has been 'liberated' and is uniformly grateful, nor is it a country uniformly devastated by a foreign attack. It is a deeply divided society processing an enormous shock through contradictory but equally authentic responses.

Deep Analysis

Synthesis

The dual crowd is the most honest single image of what Iran actually is: a country in which the same event — the death of the supreme leader under foreign bombs — produces both relief and grief, sometimes within the same family. Western media's tendency to amplify the celebrations and authoritarian media's tendency to show only the mourning and the bombs are both acts of political curation rather than journalism. The political implications are profound: any post-Khamenei governance arrangement must reckon with a society that is genuinely split, not one that has been uniformly liberated. The mourning crowds are not simply regime plants or coerced participants — they represent a constituency that will need to be accommodated in any stable settlement, and whose alienation will be a resource for any actor seeking to destabilise whatever comes next.

Root Causes

The pro-regime crowd reflects constituencies with genuine stakes in the survival of the Islamic Republic's order: families of IRGC members, religious conservatives whose identity and community infrastructure is bound to the clerical state, and those who genuinely feared the alternative more than the regime. The January 2026 massacre (Event 10) did not eliminate these constituencies; it radicalised both sides of the divide simultaneously. Decades of state investment in religious and ideological infrastructure — mosques, seminaries, state media — have produced a genuine social base for the Islamic Republic that cannot be dismissed as pure performance, even if its size relative to the opposition is uncertain.

Escalation

The existence of organised pro-regime mourning crowds alongside street celebrations creates conditions for inter-communal confrontation. If IRGC units (Event 2) are protecting or facilitating mourning gatherings while simultaneously intimidating celebratory crowds, the potential for direct violent clashes between the two groups increases significantly. Historical transitions from authoritarian regimes in which the security apparatus retains armed capacity — Iraq 2003, Libya 2011 — demonstrate that dual-crowd dynamics can rapidly transition from parallel protest to active conflict. The interim council's ability to prevent such confrontation is uncertain given the disruption to command structures following the strikes.

What could happen next?

1 meaning2 risk1 consequence1 precedent

Meaning
The dual crowd reveals that Iran is not experiencing a unified liberation but a contested societal fracture that will define the political character of whatever governance follows.
Immediate · Assessed
Risk
Direct confrontation between mourning and celebration crowds, particularly if IRGC units align with one side, could trigger inter-communal violence in Tehran and other major cities.
Immediate · Assessed
Consequence
Pro-regime constituencies, even if currently a minority, represent a durable political base that any interim or successor government will need to manage rather than simply suppress.
Medium term · Assessed
Risk
The societal fracture visible in dual crowds will be exploited by external actors — Russia, China, and regional proxies — to sustain instability and prevent consolidation of any pro-Western successor government.
Medium term · Assessed
Precedent
If mourning crowds provide a social base for IRGC remnants to reconstitute political authority, Iran could follow a trajectory similar to post-2003 Iraq, where regime remnants became the nucleus of sustained insurgency.
Long term · Suggested

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from United Kingdom

United Kingdom×2

The simultaneous existence of mourning and celebration crowds following the death of an authoritarian leader is not unprecedented.

After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Soviet citizens publicly mourned while many privately celebrated; the distinction between performed and genuine grief was later documented extensively.

Following Saddam Hussein's capture in 2003, Iraq similarly split between those who mourned the old order and those who celebrated its fall, with the split broadly tracking sectarian and ethnic lines.

Why it’s relevant now

The Iranian parallel is more complex than either precedent because the split does not map cleanly onto ethnicity or sect — it reflects the depth of polarisation produced by a government that killed tens of thousands of its own citizens six weeks before its leader's death.

Political scientists studying authoritarian transitions — including those at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the European Council on Foreign Relations — have consistently found that post-authoritarian fracture along loyalist/opposition lines is more dangerous when the incumbent security apparatus remains armed and the opposition lacks unified leadership. Iran's situation is complicated further by the absence of a credible domestic opposition organisation capable of channelling either crowd toward a political process.

The coexistence of mourning and celebration in the same city simultaneously is a diagnostic indicator of what transitional justice scholars call a 'contested legitimacy' environment, in which neither side accepts the other's right to define The National narrative.

Sources:Middle East Eye·Iran International

Mentions:Qom →National Security Council (Iran) →United Nations Security Council (UNSC) →Karaj →European Council on Foreign Relations →Iran-Iraq War →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Basij →Iran →Tehran →Middle East Eye →

First Reported In

Update #5 · Bread lines and IRGC fear inside Iran

Middle East Eye· 1 Mar 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Iran confirms Khamenei killed by Israel

Confirmation of Khamenei's death generated both celebrations and pro-regime mourning — polarised domestic response

Occurred 1 Mar 2026

Read story →

This Event

Mourning and fireworks on Iran streets

The simultaneous mourning and celebrating reveals that Iran's population is deeply fractured along lines that predate the strikes, complicating any narrative — Western or Iranian government — that claims to speak for 'the Iranian people' as a whole.

Different Perspectives

India (BRICS meeting host, grey-market beneficiary)

New Delhi hosted the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting on 14 May that Araghchi attended under the Minab168 designation, giving India a front-row seat to Iran's diplomatic positioning. India's state refiners have been absorbing discounted Iranian crude through grey-market routing since April; Brent at $109.30 means every barrel sourced outside the formal market generates a structural saving.

Hengaw / Kurdish human rights monitors

Hengaw's daily reports from Iran's Kurdish provinces remain the sole independent cross-check on Iran's judicial activity during the conflict. Two executions across Qom and Karaj Central prisons on 15 May and five Kurdish detentions on 15-16 May indicate the wartime judicial pipeline is operating independently of military tempo.

Pakistan (mediator and bilateral partner)

Islamabad spent its diplomatic capital as the US-Iran MOU carrier to secure LNG passage for two Qatari vessels through a bilateral Pakistan-Iran agreement, spending its mediation credit for direct economic gain. China's public endorsement of Pakistan's mediatory role on 13 May is the structural reward.

China and BRICS bloc

Beijing endorsed Pakistan's mediatory role on 13 May, one day after the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi. Chinese state banks are processing PGSA yuan toll payments; China has not commented on its vessels' continued Hormuz passage, but benefits structurally from a non-dollar toll system it did not design.

Iraq (bilateral passage partner)

Baghdad negotiated a 2-million-barrel VLCC transit without paying PGSA yuan tolls, offering political alignment in lieu of cash. Iraq's position inside Iran's adjacent bloc makes it the natural first bilateral partner and a template for how Tehran structures passage deals with states that cannot afford Western coalition membership.

Bahrain and Qatar (Gulf signatories)

Both signed the Western coalition paper while hosting US Fifth Fleet and CENTCOM's Al Udeid base, respectively. Qatar occupies the sharpest contradiction: it is on coalition paper while simultaneously receiving LNG passage through the bilateral Iran-Pakistan track, a position Doha has tacitly accepted from both sides.