Intrepid Shiite Pilgrims March Into Sacred City

The pilgrims have been walking for days, some of them, past the palm groves and abandoned battlefields and dusty farms. In a clamor of clapping hands and booming prayer, they have traced the old paths to this sacred city.

They have come by foot, limping and jogging along the roads from Baghdad, Mosul and Najaf. A 13-year-old boy dutifully pushed his crippled brother in a wheelchair. And once in Karbala, some men have crawled on bloodied knees.

Hundreds of thousands of Shiites have been marching to Karbala, eager to reach the shrine in time for today’s mass rites. They have marched, as tradition prescribes, because their annual season of mourning has come to an end. And this year, they have marched because they could.

This is the first time in decades that Iraq’s Shiites have been free to commemorate the death of Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Along the pilgrimage to his tomb, religious fervor has become entwined with political aspiration. The secular regime that repressed the Shiites has fallen; the procession is ripe with the spirit of possibility.

“Sincerely, I’m telling you, I feel free,” said Anad Khishaish, a 62-year-old graybeard who marched south about 50 miles from Baghdad on swollen feet. “For many years we were scared and we had Saddam’s people chasing us.”

Saddam Hussein abhorred this ritual, regarding it as a potentially destabilizing show of muscle by the Shiites, a majority group of about 16 million people in a nation run by his Sunni-dominated Baath Party.

Year after year, as Saddam Hussein stifled the Shiites, they sought to perform the rites in secret. Pilgrims crept along back roads, slipped into secret ceremonies, hid from government spies. Meanwhile, soldiers flooded the roads to choke Karbala shut. Worshipers were arrested, tortured and killed.

“We were so afraid, we buried the dead in our houses,” said Abu Naseer Nihmeh, a 32-year-old pilgrim who wandered the route south from Baghdad on Monday. “If our people were wounded, we treated them in secret.”

The days of furtive worship are decidedly over. Shiites have been marching in the streets of Baghdad for days in anticipation of their pilgrimage, and songs echoed over the pastures on the way to Karbala on Monday.

Worshipers slept under an open sky and built campfires from fallen palm trees. They were feted on their path with offers of mattresses and pillows from nearby homes; villagers stirred pots of tea and vats of rice and provided spigots to rinse weary feet.

When the time came for daily prayer, the pilgrims spread their rugs in the road and bent their heads to the earth. Before a cornfield, a holy man sang from the bed of a pickup truck. Soft rains cooled their backs, and the sky overhead stood pearly and cool.

Upon reaching the green waters of the Euphrates, worshipers sat on the banks and soaked their feet.

Stray cluster bombs, blasted craters and burned-out cars framed the road, but nobody seemed to mind. By late afternoon Monday, the road from Baghdad was clogged with an impenetrable screen of bodies.

“The people are coming in such numbers because they feel liberated,” said Hamze Tarish, who crawled through Karbala to the shrine on swollen knees. “Look at me -- I’m ready to sacrifice myself, even.”

He would soon have the chance to pray -- today’s ritual is a melange of prayer and punishment of the flesh. Some Shiites will whip themselves and pierce their skin in memory of Hussein, who was killed in the 7th century. Every year, the anniversary of his death is marked with 40 days of mourning, a sorrowful season that will culminate this year in a final communal frenzy at his tomb in Karbala.

A man who rallied his tiny force and charged into an impossible fight against a daunting foe, Hussein is fixed in Shiite doctrine as a symbol of martyrdom and defiance, freedom and suicidal daring. He was the engineer of revolution, a man who set out knowing he was bound for disaster.

His saucer-eyed portrait looms large this week, pasted on car windshields and hoisted in thick frames. Hussein’s sorrowful face is often cast against a flaming sky, his body punched through by the arrows of infidels.

But there are also newer martyrs: Grainy black-and-white photographs of Shiite holy men assassinated by the Baath Party also have adorned the procession.

“We were killed by Saddam Hussein,” said Ali al Baghdadi, a mosque leader from Baghdad who said he was arrested and tortured in 1995. While his followers clustered around a roadside lunch of cucumbers and charred bread, Baghdadi kneaded his long hands.

Secret police took his brother away in 1993, he said, and “if any of us tried to speak, we’d be killed or taken from the house.”

This week, the road to Karbala has been virtually unsupervised. The only sort of Iraqi soldiers in view were a gaggle of followers of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, who, under the watchful eye of U.S. soldiers, hopped along with the music and waved eagerly at the passing crowds. Haider Sharif, one of the followers, stood with a Shiite headband wrapped around his forehead and kissed the cheeks of passing worshipers.

“I’d prefer to be with them,” he said wistfully. “But I’m on duty.”

On the streets of Karbala, men were splitting wood, pitching tents in vacant lots, selling chunks of dirt because, just maybe, the earth might contain a trace of the martyr’s blood spilled so long ago. Lush gardens outside the mosque were smothered with the bodies of slumbering pilgrims. The air smelled of sweat and exhaustion.

The newcomers pushed past the crowd, eyes fixed with purpose. When at last they reached the shrine, they stumbled down the steps, weeping and shouting and kissing the tiled walls. Within, a dense sea of bodies swirled and seethed under an open sky. The walls rang with prayer and with the clapping of hands on hundreds of breasts.

One by one, as the pilgrims set foot on the holy ground, they gave themselves up to the worship and disappeared into the crowd of Shiites.

They’d come far for this, and the road had been hard.