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Karbala
The Iraqi shrine city of Imam Husayn and the vast Arbaeen pilgrimage
On the tenth day of the month of Muharram in 680, Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed with most of his male relatives and companions on the plain of Karbala by the army of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. For Shia Muslims his death is the defining story of sacrifice and resistance to injustice, mourned every year on Ashura, and his shrine at Karbala is among the holiest places on Earth. Forty days after Ashura comes Arbaeen, when millions converge on the city, many walking for days from Najaf, Basra, and beyond, fed and sheltered along the way by volunteers. It is often described as the largest annual gathering of people in the world.
Karbala lies on the edge of the desert west of the Euphrates, about 100 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, amid date-palm groves watered by irrigation canals. At its heart two great shrines face each other across an open esplanade called Bayn al-Haramayn, between the two sanctuaries. The shrine of Imam Husayn, with its golden dome and two golden minarets, holds his tomb, and a few hundred meters away rises the shrine of his half-brother al-Abbas, the standard-bearer who died in the same battle. Both are wrapped in large courtyards, mirror-mosaic halls, and recent expansions, and the surrounding streets are given over to hotels, guesthouses, and pilgrim services. The city is the capital of Karbala Governorate and one of the fastest-growing in Iraq.
A shrine rose over Husayn's grave early in the Islamic era and was rebuilt many times. The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil had it destroyed around 850, Wahhabi raiders sacked the city in 1802, and Ottoman troops stormed it in 1843. Under Saddam Hussein, Shia rituals were restricted, and the shrines were shelled during the 1991 uprising. Since 2003, pilgrimage has grown enormously. Iraq's 2024 census counted about 784,000 people in the city. The al-Abbas shrine's electronic count put Arbaeen 2026 attendance at nearly 20 million, after roughly 21 million in 2025, and Iraqi security officials reported about 4.9 million foreign pilgrims in 2026, many of them from Iran. Security, summer heat, and services for such crowds are the city's main challenges.