On Friday morning, June 13, the Tasnim news agency reported that Major General Hossein Salami and other military and civilian figures had been assassinated in an Israeli strike overnight. Tasnim also said that Mohammad-Mehdi Tehranchi, a nuclear scientist and president of the Islamic Azad University, and Fereydoun Abbasi, also a nuclear scientist and former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran were assassinated in separate strikes. Also, according to Tasnim, Commander of Khatam al-Anbia Headquarters Major General Gholamali Rashid was assassinated in the Israeli strikes.
That’s a lot of strikes, which continued for 12 days and reached hundreds of Iranian military and civilian senior officials.
This would explain the Thursday report from IranWire, a joint venture of a group of Iranian journalists inside and outside Iran, founded by journalist and author Maziar Bahari (Then They Came for Me), that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has called off Thursday’s funeral for its commander-in-chief, Hossein Salami, citing “security measures and decisions by relevant officials.”
According to IranWire, the IRGC’s Saheb al-Zaman Corps in Isfahan province announced in a statement that the ceremony “would not be held as planned.”
On Wednesday, Tasnim published the full funeral schedule beneath the images of the six assassinated high-ranking officials (that’s 432 virgins altogether).
“The national funeral of Iran’s martyred commanders, who were assassinated in the recent Israeli aggression, will be held in Tehran on Saturday,” the outlet declared.
Iranian state media reported that people, officials, and religious figures would gather in the capital to mourn what they call a “national loss,” following Israel’s unprecedented June 13 airstrikes. According to Iranian sources, the “Zionist regime” launched a “war of aggression” that targeted nuclear, military, and residential sites, killing more than 600 Iranians—including top generals, nuclear scientists, and high-ranking civilians.
Iran claimed its response was swift and forceful. The IRGC’s Aerospace Force reportedly launched 22 waves of retaliatory missile strikes on Israeli cities under the banner of “Operation True Promise III,” which, according to Iranian reports, inflicted “heavy losses” and forced Israel “to beg for a ceasefire.”
The funeral procession for the “martyrs of the Zionist regime’s aggression” was going to begin at 8:00 a.m. Saturday at the main gate of Tehran University and proceed toward Azadi Square, with what officials expected to be massive public and governmental participation.
According to IranWire, Hossein Salami had become widely reviled in Iran for his role in the 2020 downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane and the violent crackdown on anti-regime protests in 2022.
Known for his fiery rhetoric and grandiose boasts about the IRGC’s capabilities, Salami saw his credibility further erode after publicly endorsing the so-called “Corona-detector Mosta’an”—a device claimed to detect COVID-19 from a distance, which quickly became the subject of widespread mockery.
In the aftermath of the Ukrainian plane tragedy, Salami sought to justify the incident by telling grieving families that the IRGC’s missile strike had prevented an “inevitable military conflict with America.”
Just two days before his death, Salami issued a final threat against Israel, vowing retaliation “harder than the True Promise 1 operation” if Iran were attacked.
