ExclusiveIran Just Buried Its Leader—And Threatened Its President

Iran buried its supreme leader this week. Along the way, its own people tried to bury their president. Pazeshkian, the man leading Iran's negotiations with Washington, was surrounded in the streets of Tehran. Shoved, shaken, shouted down as the appeaser. His foreign minister was chased through an alley and struck with a stone. Not by protesters, but by mourners. That's what a state funeral looked like inside the Islamic Republic this week. Hi everyone. Welcome to News Planet. I'm your host, Kathleen Lee. Thank you for joining us. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran for over three decades. In February, he was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike at the start of the war. His funeral was delayed for months, planning problems, political infighting, before finally unfolding this past week across five Iranian cities and into Iraq. Today it ends in Mashhad, where he's being buried at the Imam Reza Shrine. But while the state was staging a funeral, it was also staging a warning. During Monday's procession in Tehran, a crowd of hardline mourners surrounded President Pazeshkian, chanting death to the appeaser, as his security detail pushed the crowd back. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, the man actually sitting across the table from American negotiators, was hit with a stone and chased through a side street, his attackers cursing him and calling for his death. Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, hasn't appeared in public once since taking the position, not even at his own father's burial. Hours after the procession, Iran struck tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, triggering another exchange of fire with the U.S. military. Same week, same government, two entirely different messages. Iranian officials call this a French minority, a handful of extremists who don't represent the country's leadership or its grief. They've publicly condemned the attacks and called for the attackers to be prosecuted. That may be true. Most of the mourners in Tehran this week weren't attacking anyone. They were burying a man many of them revered. But a government doesn't get to claim unity in public and manage a live power struggle in private. Eventually, one version has to be the real one. Washington is negotiating with Peshkian and Iraqi, two specific men whose own government mourners are calling for their deaths in the street. A ceasefire is only as durable as the authority of the people who sign it. If they can't guarantee their own safety at a funeral, what exactly are they guaranteeing at the table? This isn't just an Iran story. It's a pattern. Every time the U.S. negotiates with a regime that isn't fully unified, it's really negotiating with whichever faction wins the internal fight after the cameras leave. The question isn't just what Iran agrees to. It's whether the men agreeing to it will still be standing. It's tempting to read this as chaos inside an enemy government and move on. But apply the same standard we'd apply anywhere else. If a hostile government's own negotiators were being mobbed and stoned by their own hardliners right before a deal, would we call that stability? We wouldn't. We'd call it exactly what it is. We aren't exactly claiming that the regime is collapsing. That's a bigger claim than the evidence supports. However, it's clear that the men negotiating with Washington cannot fully guarantee their own authority at home. And any deal built on that foundation is as strong as the weakest man standing in the crowd. A funeral meant to project unity. A president mobbed. A foreign minister stoned. A regime that buried its leader and revealed its fracture in the same week. That's all we have today for News Planet. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.