Of Mourning and Might: Iran’s Military Elite Gather for a Farewell

According to Saed News, if one were to leaf through the pages of Iran’s living history, the ceremony held on the afternoon of Thursday, October 25th, 2018, at Tehran’s Abouzar Grand Mosque, might appear as a minor footnote. But to the trained eye, it reads like a photo album of the Islamic Republic’s power structure in soft focus. The occasion was the memorial service for the father of Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the late commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force. The attendees, however, were the real story.

Among the mourners stood some of the Islamic Republic’s most recognisable faces: Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff; IRGC Commander Hossein Salami, the embodiment of military bravado; and filmmaker Ebrahim Hatamikia, the auteur laureate of wartime cinema. Their presence, immortalised in carefully choreographed photographs, was not simply an act of condolence—it was a political signal wrapped in clerical black.

General Hajizadeh, born in 1961 in Tehran, rose to prominence in 2009 when he was appointed commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Division. He remained in that role until June 12th, 2025, when he was reportedly martyred in Tehran—though the precise details of his death remain, as ever, shrouded in revolutionary ambiguity.

The memorial service, ostensibly for Hajizadeh’s father, was something of a retrospective on the general himself. The display of solidarity among Iran’s military elite served a dual purpose: a gesture of loyalty to a fallen comrade, and a public reaffirmation of institutional continuity. In a system where death often doubles as myth-making, the line between mourning and messaging is thin.

As photographs from the service circulated—uniforms stiff with ceremony, faces framed by grief and gravitas—the images invited more than just sympathy. They reminded observers, domestic and foreign alike, that in Iran, the funerary ritual is often a prelude to political aftershocks.

No eulogies were reported in the press. But then again, in a republic where symbolism speaks louder than words, none were necessary.