Millions join funeral procession for Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei.

The scale and depth of the march, however engineered, marked an extraordinary turnaround for a country that only seven months ago was gripped by street protests in which thousands were killed by government security forces. Many will say the assembly was a monument to a misconceived war launched on Iran by Donald Trump in February.

The crowds moved from east to west through Tehran, from Revolution Square to Azadi Square, after the body of the supreme leader and members of his slain family had been given a two-day funeral at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla mosque. The Tehran metro was packed as crowds tried to join the march. The funeral procession was expected to last between 10 and 12 hours, depending on the number of participants, and was always likely to draw the largest crowds, since only limited numbers could enter the vast Mosalla mosque at any one time.

After lying in state for two days at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla religious complex, the body of Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the United States-Israel war on Iran, began its journey through the capital on Monday, accompanied by large crowds of mourners, state broadcaster IRIB reported. Khamenei was killed by Israeli bombs at the launch of the war in February, in a bid to destabilize and ultimately topple the government.

Iranians mourned along the procession route before the burial in Mashhad during weeklong ceremonies. Monday’s procession will be followed by similar events in the clerical hub of Qom on Tuesday and in Iraq’s holy cities of Najaf and Karbala on Wednesday, culminating in Khamenei’s burial in his hometown of Mashhad in northeastern Iran on Thursday.

Authorities are hoping to avoid a repeat of the chaos that marred the 1989 funeral of Khamenei’s predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, which drew an estimated 10 million people, according to the state news agency IRNA. Crowd surges during Khomeini’s funeral killed more than 10 people and injured over 10,000. In a feat for the state services and the volunteer civic network feeding and housing the mourners, no one was killed this time, unlike previous state-linked funerals that quickly spiraled out of control, including the funeral of the previous supreme leader.

On Sunday, the entire Iranian leadership, depleted by successive Israeli assassinations, attended the morning prayer with one exception: the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain supreme leader and now his appointed successor. His three grieving brothers did attend, and Iranian officials insisted his absence was not due to wounds sustained in the Israeli attack on the president’s building, but to fears for his safety. Thousands filled the Grand Mosalla on Sunday to pay their respects to Khamenei and his four family members, who were killed with him on February 28 in airstrikes on his office in Tehran.