Ayatollah Khomeini

It happened during Khomeini's funeral. Immense crowds were pushing towards the open coffin with the corpse of the ayatollah. Official reporting stated that all these thousands of people wanted to get a small piece of the holy shroud, because they loved their great leader that much. Yet some ousiders were less impressed by that outburst of mass hysteria. The latter belong to the small minority of Assyrian-Chaldean Christians, and although they have been living since ancient times in the Urmia region in the northwest of Iran, in present-day Iran they seem to come from another planet. A forgotten one.