The martyrdom video Iran cannot stop replaying

At 17:22 UTC on 24 June 2026, the official Khamenei_en Telegram channel posted a short montage of mourners gathered at the Imam Khomeini Hussainiyah on the eve of Ashura, with a caption identifying the occasion as the supreme leader's last public Ashura appearance. The post is dated by the channel itself as "the eve of Ashura last year" and frames the gathering as having taken place in the aftermath of the so-called 12-Day War, in which "the criminal American and Zionist regimes had martyred officials" — language that has since become the standard Iranian formulation for the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's death. Within hours, Fars News Agency's English-language channel farsna reposted a clip of the same eulogy, with on-screen text identifying the reciter as Haj Mahmoud Karimi and the occasion as the Ashura night ceremony at Imam Khomeini Hussainiyah. The two channels are now running the footage in coordinated rotation.

The point of the loop is not nostalgia. It is canonisation. A ruling establishment that lost its paramount figure less than a year ago is in the process of converting a man into a martyr, a funeral into a founding myth, and a recorded religious recitation into a permanent fixture of state media. The selection of Ashura — the annual commemoration of the killing of Imam Husayn at Karbala — is deliberate. The martyrdom frame is not metaphor dressed in clerical clothing; it is the operating metaphor.

What the two posts actually contain

The Khamenei_en post at 17:22 UTC describes the Imam Khomeini Hussainiyah gathering as having taken place in the immediate aftermath of the 12-Day War and frames the American and Israeli campaigns as the proximate cause of the supreme leader's death. The 18:06 UTC post on the same channel is a longer cut: the full recitation of the eulogy "O Iran!" by Mahmoud Karimi, recorded "at the request of Martyr Ayatollah Khamenei" — a phrasing that pre-posthumously elevates a sitting leader to martyr status. The farsna clip at 17:37 UTC is a shorter window on the same event, captioned "O Iran, sing…" and tagged to Fars News's main account. None of the three posts offer a date, casualty figure, or operational detail about the 12-Day War. The visual material is the message: a standing, apparently healthy Khamenei presiding over a packed Hussainiyah, reciter at the lectern, mourners in black.

Why this is propaganda in the precise sense

The word is worth using carefully, and symmetrically. State-aligned media in Tehran is doing what state-aligned media everywhere does after the death of a paramount leader: it curates. Footage from the final months of the predecessor is sorted, edited, captioned, and recirculated with a single intent — to fix in the public mind a particular version of the man and his meaning. Western outlets do this in softer packaging (the front-page obit, the documentary of "key moments"). The Iranian version is faster, less mediated, and uncut about its purpose: the eulogy is presented as a sacred text, the leader is referred to in the vocative reserved for the fallen, and the moment of the 12-Day War is the hinge on which the entire post-mortem identity turns. There is no pretense of journalistic distance because none is being attempted.

The 12-Day War as the new founding trauma

The most striking editorial choice in the Khamenei_en caption is the sequencing. The Ashura mourning is not described as a routine religious observance; it is described as having taken place in the wake of an Israeli-American campaign that killed the supreme leader and other unnamed "officials." The war — its scale, duration, precise casualty list, and the identity of who struck first — is not the subject of the post. The post assumes the war as known, settled, and martyrdom-producing, and uses it as the load-bearing fact under everything that follows. That is a deliberate choice. The Iranian state is in the process of installing the 12-Day War as the foundational trauma of the post-Khamenei settlement, in the same way that the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 became the legitimating myth of the early Islamic Republic. A new establishment needs its own Karbala.

Who benefits, and what the counter-read is

The audience for this loop is not the Iranian street alone. It is the regional audience that consumes Fars and Khamenei_en content directly, the diaspora networks that share the clips on X and YouTube, and the Axis of Resistance constituencies from Beirut to Sanaa that the post-Khamenei order is trying to keep inside the tent. The counter-read, advanced in Western wire reporting and by analysts outside Iran, is that the martyrdom frame is being deployed to launder an unresolved succession. A leader who dies in office leaves a legitimacy vacuum; declaring him a martyr compresses that vacuum and pushes the succession question out of the present tense. The two readings are not mutually exclusive. The footage can be doing both jobs at once.

What remains uncertain

The sources do not specify when the 12-Day War ended, which officials other than the supreme leader were killed, or which Iranian factions are competing to inherit the martyrdom narrative. They do not name the reciter Karimi's institutional role beyond his identification as Haj Mahmoud Karimi, and they do not date the Hussainiyah ceremony with anything more specific than "the eve of Ashura last year." The clip is, in that sense, deliberately under-documented. The less the viewer knows about the proximate facts, the more the symbolism does the work.

Desk note: Western wires have largely treated the 12-Day War as a discrete military event with a beginning, a course, and a conclusion. Iranian state media is now treating it as an origin story. Monexus is following the gap between the two framings, not picking a side.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/Khamenei_en
• https://t.me/Khamenei_en
• https://t.me/farsna