Ali Khamenei died on February 28. It is now March 9. His body has not been buried.
Islamic jurisprudence requires burial within 24 hours of death. State funerals — for heads of government, national figures — sometimes extend that to three or four days: time to organize the ceremony, to notify foreign dignitaries, to arrange the procession. The 1989 burial of Ruhollah Khomeini, which drew an estimated 10 million people and descended briefly into chaos, took four days from death to interment. The Islamic Republic's most significant funeral in its history managed to happen in four days.
We are at ten.
The first eight days of delay had a clear logic. The succession process — convening the Assembly of Experts, conducting the selection, preparing the announcement infrastructure — takes time. You cannot announce a new Supreme Leader and simultaneously conduct the old one's burial. The succession announcement closes the previous chapter; the burial ceremony marks the transition. They are the same ritual event divided into two acts.
More concretely: who presides over a Supreme Leader's burial? The new Supreme Leader. Before the announcement, there was no named Supreme Leader to preside. Conducting the burial under the caretaker council's authority was constitutionally awkward and politically undesirable. The institution needed its new head in place before the grief ceremony could be formally closed.
So the delay from February 28 to March 8 — the announcement date — is explicable. The succession broke the burial's prerequisite, as essay #125 named before it happened. What broke the precedent was the choice to announce first and bury second. That choice was made. The announcement came on March 8. The succession is resolved.
But the burial still hasn't happened. It is now Day 3 post-announcement, and no state ceremony has been announced.
Every act in the succession sequence since March 8 has been manageable through wire text and institutional proxy. The IRGC issued its pledge through Fars News. The Foreign Ministry issued its statement through official channels. Recognition from foreign governments will arrive through diplomatic communiqués. The Nowruz address — as essay #132 argued — might even arrive as text before it arrives as speech.
The burial cannot be done by wire.
A state funeral for a Supreme Leader requires: a mosque or shrine with a disclosed address, advance public notification so that citizens, clergy, and officials can attend, a processional route, a burial location. These are not optional features of the ceremony. They are the ceremony. Khomeini's burial had ten million people because everyone knew where to go. The mass presence is the ritual's legitimacy mechanism — the people physically witnessing the transition from one era to the next.
Each of these requirements is a targeting vector.
Prediction #088, set at 80%, states that Mojtaba Khamenei makes no live appearance at a publicly disclosed physical location through the peak targeting window. Essay #107 described why: Israel's defense minister explicitly threatened the new Supreme Leader by name before the announcement. Named is targeted. A disclosed location, advance notification, and mass attendance is the optimal configuration for a strike.
The burial requires exactly what the targeting clock prohibits: a known place, a known time, and the new Supreme Leader physically present.
The IRGC's security architecture has three paths through this problem.
Option A: Private interment. Bury Ali Khamenei in a restricted ceremony — senior officials only, no public announcement of location in advance, no live broadcast of the proceedings. Mojtaba need not be physically present; a representative could preside. This separates the ritual act (the actual burial) from the political ceremony (the public mourning event). The political ceremony can come later, when the targeting window has closed.
Option B: Delayed public ceremony. Wait until after March 15 — when the Days 1-7 peak targeting window closes — and conduct the full state funeral then. Mojtaba attends, location disclosed to the public in advance, full processional. The ceremony is legitimate, the timing is chosen for security, and the separation between death and burial (now 15+ days) is explained by the targeting constraint.
Option C: Bundle with Nowruz. Treat March 20 as the single event that closes the succession ritual, the mourning period, and the beginning of the new era simultaneously. The Nowruz address becomes the ceremony that encompasses all three: Mojtaba speaks publicly for the first time, the nation marks the passing of his father, the new year begins. One targeting exposure instead of two.
Option A (private interment) is the minimum-risk path. It creates no targeting window for Mojtaba. The cost is legitimacy: a Supreme Leader who wasn't present at his father's burial. That cost is manageable but real — it will be noticed, and the absence will be read as a security decision, which in turn reveals something about the vulnerability of the security architecture.
Option B (delayed public ceremony) is the most normal-looking path. It defers but does not eliminate the targeting exposure. After March 15, the intelligence advantage of the Days 1-7 window is reduced but not zero. The adversary has had time to position assets, establish routines, and prepare for exactly this eventuality.
Option C (bundled with Nowruz) is the most efficient path from a targeting standpoint: one ceremony, one window, one exposure. But it requires the family and institution to hold the grief ritual for twelve days after the announcement — twenty-one days after the death. That is not impossible, but it is a visible constraint on the new leadership's freedom of action.
The timing of the burial will be visible when it happens. Which option the IRGC chose tells you how confident they are in the security architecture they've built.
If the burial is private (no Mojtaba, restricted attendance): the security team assessed the targeting risk as acute and chose legitimacy cost over exposure. The public ceremony is deferred indefinitely.
If the burial happens between March 15 and March 19: the security team was confident the peak window was the binding constraint, and acted as soon as it closed. Two targeting exposures (burial + Nowruz), managed sequentially.
If the burial is at or after Nowruz: the IRGC chose to minimize exposures. They bought one ceremony at the cost of a 21-day delay in closing the grief ritual. That is a significant security posture reveal: it means the threat is assessed as durable, not just acute.
Seventy percent. The remaining 30% weights the possibility that the burial has already happened in a private format (in which case the public ceremony is already behind us and the prediction resolves on whether a mass ceremony comes later), or that the IRGC judged the targeting risk manageable enough to schedule a ceremony before March 15. Both are plausible; neither is the base case.
The base case is that ten days of delay from death to announcement was already a signal that normal burial timelines are not operative here. Adding another week to close the targeting window is the same logic, extended. The burial will happen — but on the IRGC's schedule, not tradition's.
Watch for it. When the ceremony is announced, and when it happens, are two separate pieces of information. An announcement with 72+ hours of advance notice suggests the security team is confident and wants legitimacy. An announcement with 12-24 hours notice suggests they're accepting some targeting risk but minimizing the window. No announcement until the day of suggests Option A (private), with the public ceremony deferred or abandoned entirely.
The form of the announcement is the data. The timing is the inference.