Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian with officials attend a prayer during a public farewell ceremony to pay their respects to late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Feb. 28 in Israeli and US airstrikes, at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla, in Tehran, Iran, July 5, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/Handout via REUTERS

IRAN — The world watched Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral from above. Aerial shots of packed Tehran streets, interviews with weeping loyalists, breathless dispatches from Western social media influencers — this was the story beamed around the globe. But the real story of the late Iranian supreme leader’s send-off was unfolding just outside the frame, in the tens of millions of Iranians who simply weren’t there.

Press outlets around the world reported this week that millions attended the funeral, a figure that has never been independently verified. Echoing Iran’s state media, they presented the vast crowds as a nationwide outpouring of grief and loyalty. The more revealing question, though, is not how many filled the streets — it is how many did not, and why.

Tehran itself supplied the answer. As the mourning rituals got underway, the roads leading out of the capital clogged with traffic, not into it. Residents fled the disruptions and the atmosphere of the official ceremonies in droves, and few bothered to disguise their reasons.

“It is a holiday, and we are happy to leave Tehran and the funeral of a dictator behind and have fun for a while,” Sahar, a university lecturer who requested that only her first name be used, told The Algemeiner.

Hassan, a university student who also asked to be identified only by his first name, was equally unsentimental.

“This ceremony is ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t want to be part of it or even be near it.”

Javid, an engineer, put it most bluntly.

“Why would I mourn a dictator?” he asked. “I am glad it’s over for him.”

The scenes on social media told the same story. Iranians posted selfies and videos of their escape from the capital — bound not for the mourning processions but for the mountain resorts to the north and the coastal villages along the Caspian Sea. On Saturday, lavish Caspian hotels were posting photos of tree-lined streets teeming with cars and revelers. While state television broadcast grief, a sizable portion of the country was, quite openly, on vacation.

It is not hard to understand why. For the majority of Iran’s some 90 million people, Khamenei’s death in US-Israeli military strikes on Feb. 28 closed the book on nearly four decades of rule defined by political repression, the suppression of any dissent against Islamist rule, and deadly crackdowns on nationwide protests. A population that has buried its own dead at the regime’s hands was never likely to weep for the man who ordered the shootings.

And this is where the funeral becomes a story about something larger: the gap between how Iran is portrayed abroad and how Iranians actually live. The aerial images of “unity” broadcast by state-controlled media were treated by much of the international press as a snapshot of national sentiment. Critics of the government told The Algemeiner that they were nothing of the kind — and the composition of the crowds bears them out.

Consider who was actually in those streets. The mourners included large numbers of foreign students enrolled in Iran’s religious seminaries and universities — the beneficiaries of a long-standing regime practice of mobilizing international students for state-organized spectacles. Thousands of students from South Asia, Arab countries, and Africa study in Iran, particularly in the seminaries of the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, and they have long been reliable fixtures at official rallies and commemorations.

“Many Iranians don’t know what they have lost. Ayatollah Khamenei was a blessing for the Ummah (Islamic nation),” said Abbas, a Pakistani student in Qom — a sentiment more readily found among the regime’s imported admirers than among the Iranians heading for the Caspian coast.

The crowds were further swelled by Shiite pilgrims from abroad, drawn by Khamenei’s status as a Marja’e-Taqleed, a senior religious authority in Shiite Twelver Islam. And even then, the images may not have been what they seemed: Persian-language fact-checking accounts and independent online observers have suggested that some of the aerial photographs circulated by state-controlled media were generated or doctored using artificial intelligence.

Strip all that away — the bussed-in students, the foreign pilgrims, the possibly manufactured imagery — and the funeral looks less like a national wake and more like a carefully staged production with a shrinking domestic audience.

Tehran this week was, in effect, two cities. Along the official procession route, crowds mourned the late ayatollah under the gaze of the world’s cameras. On the highways heading north, thousands of residents sat in traffic, escaping to the “holiday.” Only one of those cities made the evening news.

That, ultimately, is the question Iranians keep asking, quietly and angrily: Where do the voices of ordinary people fit into the narratives — framed by the regime and too often adopted wholesale by the West — that claim to describe their lives? At Khamenei’s funeral, the answer was on display for anyone willing to look beyond the frame: they were on the road out of town.

Maddie Ali, a former schoolteacher, is now a freelance contributor to The Algemeiner based in Iran. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved in civic activity in her hometown, including participating in and helping organize local protests alongside friends and family. Her name has been changed to protect her identity.