‘When you burn our hearts, you do not stop us’: Iranian families weep as war dead are buried in Tehran cemetery

As gravediggers prepared new burial plots for those killed in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, Marzia Razaei wept for her son Arfan Shamei, who died in a blast at a military training camp days before he was due home on leave. The war that began on February 28 with a blitz of air strikes on Tehran and other cities has killed more than 1,300 Iranians so far, according to Iranian officials, and plunged the Middle East into crisis.

Tears streamed down Razaei’s face and she stared vacantly, hugging a large portrait of Shamei, 23, her voice breaking with grief as she recalled her last conversation with him when they discussed his coming trip back home to his family. “I hadn’t seen him for two months,” she said, adding that his last day before heading home was meant to have been Monday, the day Reuters met her.

He was to have been married soon afterwards and the trip home was part of the preparations for the wedding. Shamei was killed in a blast at his training camp in Kermanshah in western Iran on March 4 that turned his tent into a ball of flame and left his body so charred that Razaei was not able to see it.

“My son used to be scared of the dark,” she said, sitting in front of his grave in the massive Behesht-e Zahra cemetery that sprawls across a large area just south of Tehran, the rain drizzling steadily around her. Families’ grief and anger Shamei and others killed in the current conflict are buried in Section 42 of the cemetery, where a dozen gravediggers were busy on Monday preparing for burials while workers readied white marble stones engraved with the names of the deceased.

As another body was brought in for burial, the bier carried on the shoulders of family members, the sound of an air strike echoed across the cemetery, grey smoke rising up from a nearby district. Graves lay under a canopy decorated with pictures of the dead and Iranian flags, as families gathered, crying and talking. Women sat by the graves, some quietly weeping, others so distraught they were beating their chests with their fists.

A truck stood nearby, loaded with colourful flowers, and petals had been strewn across the graves as loudspeakers played Shi’ite Muslim hymns of mourning. Other graves in the section contained members of the Basij, a volunteer militia group affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, and officials and detainees from Evin Prison, which was targeted in the current war and in strikes in June last year.

Fatima Darbechi, 58, had lost her 44-year-old brother early in the war as he tried to rescue people trapped in a bombed car when another blast sprayed him with shrapnel, leaving him mortally injured. Their parents had died when he was a small child. “He grew up without a mother. I raised him,” she said, tears coursing down her cheeks.

For some of the mourners, the sorrow was matched by anger and defiance at Israel and the United States for their bombing campaign. “When you burn our hearts, you do not stop us, you do not bring us to our knees,” said the mother of 25-year-old Ihsan Jangravi, pumping her fist in the air.