TEHRAN — Iran's leadership held a series of meetings this week with senior members of a network of Middle East proxy groups, as they attended funeral ceremonies for President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash last Sunday.
State media reports covering one such meeting in Tehran showed Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, who commands the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and Esmail Qaani, the chief of the IRGC's overseas branch — the Quds Force — sitting with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement's deputy chief, Naim Qassem. Also in attendance were top representatives from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces and Yemen's Houthi movement.
The two Iranian generals, according to the official IRNA news agency, underlined the importance of a "continued struggle to be jointly fought from across the region by all resistance groups," a term Tehran uses in reference to those organizations it has been funding and arming for decades.
The anti-Israel leaders were in the Iranian capital to attend state-organized ceremonies commemorating President Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and six others who all lost their lives in the crash in a north-western Iranian mountain.
