Bloody Ashura
An American at a deadly bombing in Iraq.
By Steven Vincent
— Steven Vincent is a freelance American writer currently living in Iraq. He most recently wrote for NRO here.
KARBALA, IRAQ — The Internet cafe was dark, quiet, and nearly empty — the perfect refuge from the hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims thronging the holy city of Karbala. Exhausted from a morning spent walking in dense crowds around the city's two huge mosques, I collapsed before a computer, barely registering a soft thud sounding somewhere in the distance. Within moments the cafe owner was drawing shutters over his windows and my driver Samir was urging us to leave. "Infeejar, infeejar," he repeated — explosion, explosion. A chill shot through me when I realized what had just happened. Terrorists had attacked the religious gathering of Ashura.
We stepped into the street, as a second thump echoed from the direction of the mosques. Samir motioned toward his car, parked a quarter-mile away, as the third blast erupted. I shook my head, walking instead toward the explosions — I am a journalist, after all — hearing a fourth, then a fifth detonation. When the sixth bomb went off and sirens began to wail, the specter of a mass panic started to concern me. "Okay," I said to Samir. Relieved, the Baghdad cabbie took my hand and hustled me away from the city's center.
I had met Samir two days earlier, when he drove me to the Shia mosque of Kadhimain, in northwest Baghdad. Intrigued by an American who expressed interest in the Islamic sect, Samir offered to take me to Karbala, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, to attend Ashura, Shiites' holiest event. He seemed trustworthy, and although we could communicate only in rudimentary English-Arabic, I agreed. As it turned out, I couldn't have picked a better man.
My trip that day to Kadhimain was not my first exposure to Shiaism. Throughout my two trips to Iraq, I've struggled to understand this religious faith, observed by 60 percent of the Iraq's population, or roughly 15 million people. I've read books on the topic, talked with average worshippers, interviewed moderate and radical clerics alike. I've attended Shia services in large and small mosques throughout Baghdad. In Najaf, I posed as a Muslim and prayed at the Tomb of Ali, Shiaism's third holiest site. My Baghdad apartment is festooned with banners and posters of Shia icons Ali and Hussain.
It's not just a foreigner's taste for exoticism that draws me to Shiaism. At the very least, there is politics: to understand postwar Iraq, I felt I had to grasp the fundamentals of a faith so important to the Iraqi people. To do that, however, I knew I had to go beyond visiting mosques and purchasing religious kitsch. I had to venture toward the heart of Shiaism, its eroticization of suffering and martyrdom, its ecstatic bloodletting. And this meant going to Ashura.
The religious event commemorates the Battle of Karbala, when, in 680 A.D., Mohammad's grandson, Abu Abdullah Hussain, along his family and followers, were slaughtered by forces loyal to the corrupt governor of Damascus, Muawiyah. In Shia mythology, Hussain's martyrdom is the essence of sanctity, virtue, and obedience to God. Conversely, the imam's betrayal by Muslims living in southern Iraq is a perpetual source of shame for Shiites, one for which they seek to atone by, among other means, chanting lugubrious eulogies and flagellating themselves with chains. Others beat themselves with sticks, floggers, and swords until they bleed from the forehead and back.
This Ashura, moreover, had a special significance. For decades, Saddam suppressed Iraq's Shiite population, forcing them to commemorate Imam Hussain's martyrdom in private. Now, with the dictator's removal, Shiites could, for the first time in decades observe Ashura in the open. Their excitement was intense. Days before the event, busloads of pilgrims began pouring into Karbala, while from Baghdad south, villages and cities bloomed with multicolored flags, pennants, and standards venerating Hussain, and his father, Ali.
On the morning of Ashura (March 2), Samir and I — using a combination of Baghdad bravado and my out-of-date press card — bluffed police into letting us park near the city center. Dressed in a black dishdasha — a long tunic favored by Arabic men — and a black and white khefiyya, I followed my guide into the massive crowd. Everywhere I looked, I saw religious banners and posters, flower-strewn replicas of Hussain's casket, hordes of pilgrims weeping in joyous lamentation. Thick black bunting hung down the facade of the mosques of Hussain and his half-brother Abbas; every 100 feet produced another booth lined with black fabric, exhibiting swords, shields and mirrored tiers of glass vases. Worshippers packing Karbala's main square thumped their chests or struck themselves with heavy chains. There were also more troubling sights: a parade of about 200 cloaked Iraqi women passed by me, many of them bearing Arabic signs. "Death to America," read one, translated by Samir. "America is the Great Satan," read another.
It was difficult to assess the emotional tone of the event.
Like most religious gatherings, it had elements of a festival without a festival's levity. Moreover, the religiosity seemed somehow hyperbolic, overwrought. The constant, electronically amplified mournful chants to Hussain, were deafening; nowhere could one find a place for quiet mediation. Graphic images of blood dripped from Arabic writing and pictures of swords, a fountain by the Hussaini mosque spewed blood-like red liquid; meanwhile, real blood poured down the faces of pilgrims who had cut their heads with swords. It was like seeing the redemptive passion of Christianity externalized into Grand Guignol street theater. No wonder Shiism is so compelling, I realized. This is religion as primitive passion play, piety as a fetishization of death.
But now, real death was stalking Ashura. As we approached Samir's Toyota, an Iraqi cop car roared passed us, the vehicle's loudspeaker calling for any doctors present to report to first-aid stations. Ambulances screamed back and forth, even as pilgrims fleeing from the blasts collided in the road with those pouring into the city — to my horror I watched a Red Crescent van run down an old woman, killing her. Bystanders formed two human chains to create a corridor for ambulances and police vehicles to pass — but even then, pilgrims chanting "Ya, Hussein," attempted to breach the barrier, sparking arguments and fights. Meanwhile, a taxi cab loaded with the dead and wounded shot toward the hospital, followed by two flatbed trucks piled with bodies, their limbs burnt and bloodied. The martyrdom commemorated by Ashura had become all too real.
By now, Samir had convinced me to get in the car. But the sight of two men preparing to drive from the city center aroused suspicion. A crowd descended, preventing our departure. A policeman ran up, demanding to know my identity, and when I told him I was an American journalist, the Iraqis stiffened as if electrified. One man began screaming at me, another seized my notebook and tape recorder. Meanwhile, I overheard the policeman shouting "Amrikiyya, Amrikiyya!" to Samir, who responded, "Wahabbi, Wahabbi!" My heart stopped. The policeman — and, I could see, the crowd as well — clearly believed that America had planted the bombs and their anger toward me was mounting. But Samir — a man I barely knew — was defending me to the officer and the surrounding Iraqis, arguing that al Qaeda, and not the U.S., had attacked the pilgrims. Let us go, he cried in Arabic. With an angry gesture, the officer relented, pressing the crowd back as Samir bolted down the road, blasting his horn, and he weaved in and out of ambulances and police vehicles rushing into the city.
It was only after we cleared the last checkpoint around Karbala that we thought to turn on the radio. The news was grim — terrorists had also struck the Kadhimain mosque killed 60, maybe more. (The eventual death toll of the two attacks reached 185.) At a roadside restaurant, men listened somberly as Samir related our experiences. I just felt like crying. Despite my misgivings about Shiism, I'd grown fond of its bizarre rituals and ludicrous mythologizing. The fact that terrorists seeking to spark a sectarian had murdered scores of innocent pilgrims seemed almost unbearable. Driving back to Baghdad, Samir tuned the radio to the kind of slow, mournful lamentations for Hussain that I usually found so annoying. But now it sounded just about right.
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