A remarkable number of Sunni Muslims are performing the religious ritual shoulder to shoulder with Shiites in Iraq.
Omar Abduallh, a Sunni Muslim, said he has taken part in the commemorative service to give the US and its allies the massage that Muslims follow Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and we Sunnis love Imam Hussein (AS) too.
He pointed to the crimes committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorists, and said, “We see the ISIL as the enemy of Sunnis and believe that those terrorists want to attribute terrorism to the Sunni Muslims."
Each year, pilgrims, mainly from Iraq and Iran, travel longs routes on foot to the holy city of Karbala, where the tomb of Imam Hussein (AS) is located.
An estimated number of above one million Iranian pilgrims are expected to travel to Iraq this year for the religious rituals in commemoration of Arbaeen.
This year’s procession is of even greater significance as the ISIL terrorist group, known by both Sunni and Muslims as a foreign-backed enemy of Islam, has seized parts of Iraq since an invasion this summer.
The militants could make swift advances in northern and western Iraq after capturing large swaths of northern Syria.
However, a combination of concentrated attacks by the Iraqi military and the popular forces, who rushed to take arms after top Iraqi cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling for fight against the militants, have blunted the edge of the ISIL offensive.