Act of faith emerges from the darkness

By PHIL REEVES

All day, they kept coming.

Flocks of hunched old women plodding along the road in their stockinged feet, black chadors flapping in the hot and dusty wind.

Packs of gaunt and fiery-eyed young men striding under green and black flags, bouncing to the rhythm of their own noisy chants.

Saintly old men in white robes, limping bare-footed on the hot asphalt, resting from time to time to lean on their wooden staffs.

Some marched beating their chests; some carried babes in arms.

Ninety-six kilometres of dead-flat landscape separates Baghdad from Karbala.

Yesterday, the highway between them - a sealed motorway, but one littered with wrecked Iraqi fighting vehicles - became an unbroken flow of people.

Iraqi Shiite Muslims - and a few from neighbouring Iran - were on the move, pouring out of towns and villages towards one of their holiest cities in a traditional annual march banned by Saddam Hussein.

From Baghdad, the journey takes two days. But some who live further afield had been walking for five.

This was, first and foremost, a ritual, an act of self-sacrifice to mark the 40th day of mourning for the death of the prophet's grandson, Hussein, 1323 years ago.

This red letter day in the Shiite calendar falls on Wednesday.

But it is an event that also has considerable political significance.

Though the walkers said yesterday that this was primarily a religious event, the mass march - which will continue today - is also a show of strength by Iraq's Shiite majority, eager to lay down their marker in the political vacuum of the chaotic and dangerous post-Saddam days.

Since the war ended, the Shiites - 60 per cent of the population - have been quietly taking control of Shiite-dominated towns and neighbourhoods behind the fleeing Baathists.

It was another tacit reminder to the Americans that their community - whose aspirations bear little resemblance to Washington's hopes for the brave new world - must be taken into account.

There was little sign of gratitude from the walkers towards the Americans for sending in the occupation forces which overthrew the regime that oppressed them, banning the march and killing thousands of Shiites over the years.

As the tide of people trudged down the southbound lane of Routes 8 and 9, an armoured snake of US Army trucks and lorries carrying fuel, cranes and - intriguingly - motorboats, passed them by, heading north to the capital.

No one waved.

No one cheered. Less that two weeks after the "liberation" of the Shiites, the American soldiers attracted only wary, curious stares.

So, too, did the uneasy handful of soldiers from the so-called Free Iraqi Forces who, Kalashnikovs at the ready, were guarding the road near the entrance to Karbala.

These are the men of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile businessman wanted for fraud in Jordan, whom the Pentagon's hawks have been pushing as a possible new leader.

The post-Saddam confusion could hardly have been better illustrated.

Within a few kilometres are territory controlled by the US military, patrols by the exiles who form the little-loved Chalabi's militia, and a city in effect run by the Shiites.

The sun was barely up yesterday before Radhia Hassan Alwan, a tiny, shrivelled woman of 73, set off from her village to join the pilgrimage.

So small and haggard is she that it was hard to imagine that she could manage even to start the great walk. Yet she had covered 32km, and said she felt perfectly well.

She said she had always made the annual pilgrimage, but for the past 30 years it was in secret, sneaking across the fields to avoid Saddam's snoops and henchmen.

She was caught on several occasions by intelligence agents, who beat and harassed her.

"I felt totally alone," she recalled, watching people stream down the road towards her. "Now I am very, very happy."

Ali Abdul Hussein al-Abzawi, a 30-year-old labourer, said he had walked 240km in five days to get to Karbala.

He, too, claimed to have covertly made the pilgrimage for years - in his case, since 1994.

At lunchtime in the central plaza of Karbala, people were recovering from the walk by sleeping under the colonnades or browsing through the pavement stalls, now selling previously banned books and pictures of Shiite clerics.

There were photos of the powerful Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani of Najaf, the scholar Professor Mohammed al-Wa'ali, and Ayatollah Mohammed al-Hakim, the pro-Iranian religious leader whose 30,000-man militia is running some border towns.

Karbala is now firmly in the control of the Shiite elders. Last week a 10-man council was elected to help oversee the running of the city, but it seemed clear that orders came from the mosque.

Plastered on the entrance of Karbala's two great gold-domed shrines - tombs of the Imam Hussein and his half-bother Abbas, both deemed martyrs by Shiites - were demands for the notoriously divided Muslims of Iraq to unite, a repeated theme on the streets these days.

Placards carried by a few in the marching masses were equally explicit. "Yes, yes, to Islam. No, no to occupation," said one.

The men in the cafes of Karbala are still smouldering over America's failure to support the Shiite uprising of 1991.

As they supped their tea, there were the now-routine expressions of appreciation towards the US and British for toppling Saddam.

But the real emotion was reserved for President George W. Bush, whose motives for invading Iraq are seen as a starkly self-interested quest for oil. "We reject the occupation completely, said Riad al-Musawi, a 40-year-old baker. They have promised to leave the country, but if they don't we will fight them with knives and stones."

Sentiments such as these have become a mantra, heard on every street corner and cafe. The fact that they are already a cliche, less than two weeks after the tanks rolled into Baghdad, serves only to make them more significant.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq war