This blog is now closed. You can read our full dispatch from the funeral here:

• ‘We won’t stop until we find them all’: joy gives way to grief as Syria buries its dead

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the country has to live with the new “realities” of Syria after the toppling of Tehran-backed president Bashar al-Assad, state media reported on Thursday.

Regarding Syria, Iran “was really trying day and night to help in whatever way it could; we have to live with the realities of Syria; we look at them and act based on them,” Hossein Salami said, quoted by the official IRNA news agency.

Strategies must change according to the circumstances; we cannot solve numerous global and regional issues with stagnation and employing the same tactics