By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

Tehranis gave a fitting farewell to their beloved freedom fighter yesterday with an estimated turnout of 8 million mourners that stretched for over twelve km from Imam Husain (AS) Square in the east to Azadi Tower in west, with vows of vengeance for his innocent blood amid vociferous cries of "Death to the U.S.”, and later in evening the same atmosphere was witnessed in holy Qom, where the bodies were taken.
The soul of General Qassem Soleimani, along with the souls of his colleagues, including Iraq’s intrepid defender of his country’s independence, Abu Mahdi al-Muhanddis, who were victims of last Friday’s dastardly act of terrorism by the criminal called Donald Trump, are in Paradise having fulfilled their earthly goals, and leaving behind an immortal legacy that promises to wipe out terrorists of all shades, no matter if for the moment these cowardly murderers are rejoicing.
Today, the person who ensured the peace and stability of not only his homeland and his compatriots but also of the people of neighbouring countries struggling against repression, occupation, invasion, terrorism, and American hegemony, is being laid to eternal rest in his hometown Kerman where more than a million people have converged from the adjoining towns and cities for the last rites, while Abu Mahdi’s mortal remains have been flown to Iraq for a deserving place in Wadi as-Salaam (Valley of Peace) in the vicinity of the holy shrine of the First Martyr of the Prophet’s (SAWA) Blessed House, the Ahl al-Bayt, Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb (AS) in Najaf.
Before arrival of the coffins of the martyrs in Ahvaz from Iraq on Sunday morning to a massive reception by a bereaved nation and their subsequent flight in the afternoon to Mashhad where some three million people welcomed them at the holy shrine of Imam Reza (AS), funerary ceremonies were held in Kazemain, Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, at each stop, vowing vengeance and burning the U.S. and Israeli flags, amid shouts of "Death to the U.S.”
As a matter of fact, the sacred blood of the Iranian and Iraqi martyrs has begun to bear fruits for further strengthening of Islamic solidarity and fraternity between the two age-old neighbours which the U.S. had tried in vain to divide, first through its agents the Pahlavis and the Ba’thists, and now through a group of paid thugs and vandals in the two countries, indulging in acts of violence and sedition against the elected governments.
Sunday was indeed a memorable day, when the parliaments of the two countries, in Tehran and Baghdad, echoed with chants of "Death to the U.S.” – "Marg bar Amrika” in Persian and "al-Mowt lil-Amrika” in Arabic – while Iraqi lawmakers approved the bill for expulsion of all U.S. forces.
Similarly, it was a spectacular sight to see, all throughout the massive funerary processions from Iraq to Iran, of the coffins of the martyrs of the two countries draped in their national flags, both of which have God’s Majesty (Allah-o Akbar) inscribed upon them in their respective styles, while the message to the world of the devilish nature of the U.S. was that famous apt description by the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), whether in Persian or Arabic, "Shaytan-e Bozorg” and "Shaytan al-Akbar”.
This indeed augurs the triumph of the people’s power in the whole region for which the Hammer of Terrorists, General Qassem Soleimani, relentlessly strove, and the beginning of the end of the illegal U.S. presence in our neighbourhood, with not just the peoples of Iran and Iraq, but the entire Resistance Front stretching throughout the Muslim World, determined to avenge the blood of the noble martyrs.