KARBALA, Iraq // Huge crowds of Shiites gathered in Iraq and Lebanon on Tuesday to mark a key holy day in defiance of the Sunni extremist militant group ISIL.
Police and troops were out in force as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims massed in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala to commemorate Ashura, while tens of thousands rallied in the Lebanese capital Beirut.
This year’s observance of the day has taken on new meaning after ISIL seized control of large parts of Iraq and Syria.
The Sunni militants consider Shiites heretics and have targeted them in deadly attacks, a string of which killed more than 40 people in Baghdad alone in the 48 hours preceding the peak of Ashura on Tuesday.
This year’s commemorations are “about defying [ISIL] because they declared their hostility and made threats to kill Muslims and bomb the cities and holy shrines,” said Saad Jabbar, 54, who came to Karbala from Dhi Qar province in the south.
The commemorations mark the killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, by the army of the Caliph Yazid in 680 AD, which helped solidify the divide between what would become the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam.
There were no reports of attacks against pilgrims in Iraq on Tuesday, after more than 25,000 members of the security forces were deployed in Karbala itself and thousands more in Baghdad and along routes to the city.
In Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs – a stronghold of the Shiite Hezbollah movement – have seen a string of deadly attacks, many of them claimed by extremist militants, since the group started sending fighters to Syria three years ago.
Thousands of Hizbollah fighters are supporting the troops of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad against the mainly Sunni rebels battling his regime.
ISIL declared a “caliphate” in areas under its control in June, imposing its harsh interpretation of Islamic law and committing widespread atrocities.
Concern over the rise of the extremist group prompted Washington to form a coalition of Western and Arab nations that has carried out a barrage of air strikes on its positions in Iraq and Syria.
In Syria, the strikes in recent days have focused on the besieged town of Kobani on the Turkish border, where local Kurdish militia have been holding off an ISIL offensive for seven weeks.
At the weekend the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units militia defending the town was reinforced by about 150 Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters with heavy weapons.
The peshmerga have been manning artillery in support of the Kobani Kurds and “heavily shelling” ISIL positions, a commander said in the town said on Tuesday.
ISIL militants were on Tuesday reported to have released at least 93 Syrian Kurds from Kobani who were kidnapped in February while en route to Iraq.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that relies on a network of sources on the ground, said about 160 Kurds were abducted at the time and the hostages had been held in the Syrian ISIL stronghold of Raqqa.
Human Rights Watch said meanwhile that ISIL subjected a group of Kobani teenagers to a string of abuses, including torture, during captivity.
The 153 schoolchildren were taken hostage in May, and suffered regular beatings at the hands of the militants before being released, said the New York-based watchdog.
Interviewed in Turkey where they were given refuge, four boys from the group recounted regular beatings with cables and a hose and being forced to watch videos of ISIL militants in combat and beheading captives.
The militants forced the children – aged 14 to 16 – to pray five times a day and beat those who tried to escape or did poorly in compulsory religious lessons, the New York-based group said.
“Those who didn’t conform to the programme were beaten. They beat us with a green hose or a thick cable with wire running through it. They also beat the soles of our feet,” one boy was quoted as saying.
“They made us learn verses of the Quran and beat those who didn’t manage to learn them. When some boys tried to escape, the treatment got worse and we were all punished and given less food.”
Those whose families were close to the Kurdish fighters defending Kobani were singled out by the captors, who were from Syria, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia, a boy said.
“They told them to give them the addresses of their families, cousins, uncles, saying ‘When we go to Kobani we will get them and cut them up’.”
The boys said they were given no explanation for their release other than that they had completed their religious education.
* Agence France-Presse