WEEPING, praying and invoking the names of their long-dead prophets, half a million pilgrims teemed through the narrow streets of the Muslim holy city of Karbala in southern Iraq yesterday.

As the crowds streamed towards the al-Hussein mosque, where they clamoured to touch the shrine at the spot where Muhammad’s grandson died in battle, they were watched from street corners by young conscripts, chain-smoking and nervously fingering the safety-catches of their AK47s.

The pilgrims, who travel each week from Iran and Lebanon, from as far south as India and as far north as Azerbaijan, pay little heed to the countless murals showing President Saddam Hussein’s smiling face, or to the many banners urging Iraqis to vote for him at next week’s one-man election.

For Karbala is a Shia city, the al-Hussein mosque and the nearby al-Abbas mosque are both Shia shrines, and this was the scene of the bloodiest fighting during the Shia uprising that followed the Gulf War.

About 60 per cent of Iraqis are Shia, and they have been largely excluded from power and denied the fruits of the country’s lucrative oil-smuggling trade, because Saddam and his ruling clique are Sunni Muslims, a grouping that counts for 18 per cent of the population.

Saddam has ruthlessly repressed this volatile majority, murdering one cleric after another and ordering his largely Sunni Republican Guard to crush any hint of rebellion.

In 1980, shortly before declaring war on Iran, he hanged two of the country’s leading Shia figures. There were further bloody reprisals in 1996 after Shia gunmen crippled his elder son, Uday, when they opened fire on his Porsche. Then, three years ago, the last Grand Ayatollah of Iraq, Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was murdered, together with his two sons.

Despite the years of oppression, the conscripts in Karbala had good reason to be edgy yesterday: the Shias represent a constant threat to Saddam’s survival. Moreover, as the White House contemplates a regime change, there is a growing realisation that the empowerment of the Shias could end in the break-up of Iraq and that the turmoil could spill far beyond its borders.

Karbala may be a mud-coloured city, lying close to the mud-coloured waters of the Euphrates, but it is a place steeped in blood. It was the massacre here in AD680 of Imam Hussein and his followers that led to the great schism between Sunnis and Shias.

Hussein was attacked as he and 70 supporters were trying to seize control of the growing Islamic empire from the caliphs who had been appointed on the death of his grandfather, Muhammad. He was shot through the mouth with an arrow, then a troop of horsemen rode back and forth across his body and his head was carried in triumph from the battlefield.

Centuries later there would be slaughter again. In March 1991 the residents of Karbala joined those of Basra, 315 miles to the south, in the uprising against Saddam. The Iraqi Army fled in terror, about 75 Baath Party officials were hurled from their office windows to be hacked to death by the mob below and it seemed for one heady moment as if the regime were about to fall.

But no strong leader emerged and there was no support from the West. The Republican Guard returned 11 days later to perpetrate the worst bloodbath that Karbala has seen.

The guardsmen are said to have been merciless, ploughing through the bazaars in

T72 tanks emblazoned with the slogan “No Shias After Today” and fighting from house to house until the last rebels sought sanctuary in the magnificent 11th-century al-Hussein and al-Abbas mosques.

The copper-domed shrines are revered almost as much as Mecca by millions of Shias across the East, yet Saddam’s troops did not hesitate to train their tank guns and heavy artillery on them. The surviving rebels are said to have been hanged from lampposts or dragged to their deaths behind the T72s. Their families were hunted down and shot.

The shrines have been rebuilt, but some of their grey marble walls remain pock-marked by shrapnel, and fear still enshrouds the city, mingling with the sand that drifts in from the Mesopotamian Desert.

Today there are fears of a fourth historic massacre at Karbala if renewed American and British attacks on Iraqi forces ignite the city’s religious fervour, economic frustration and hatred of Sunni oppression.

Even on the outskirts of Baghdad, 20 minutes’ drive from Saddam’s opulent Radwaniyah Palace, about a million impoverished Shias are crammed into a sprawling, fly-blown slum known, ironically enough, as Saddam City. Rotting garbage stands waist-high outside crumbling 1970s tenement blocks, where aid agencies say that one in seven children die before their fifth birthday and where a weekly income of £3 is considered a good wage.

The spectre of another Shia rebellion will not only alarm Saddam, it must also disturb Washington, as it highlights the dangers behind talk of a regime change.

President Bush held out hope of democracy in Iraq in his speech to the United Nations last month, and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, says that he foresees the country being governed “in a democratic fashion”.

But a democratic Iraq would be a predominantly Shia Iraq and one which may choose to forge closer ties with its Persian co-religionists in Iran, the second nation in President Bush’s “axis of evil”. Some in the West fear even that a Shia Iraq may become an Islamic state.

Shia supremacy in Iraq could also stir the restless Shia majority in Bahrain, who have also been excluded from power. It could encourage the Kurds in the north, who are largely Sunni, to press for independence: a scenario that Turkey and Syria, with their own large Kurdish populations, are determined to avoid at any cost.

As the faithful clung to the al-Hussein shrine yesterday, worshipping their prophets with an emotional abandon that was in sharp contrast to the strict self-control of the Sunnis, rebellion must have been far from their minds. But as they stepped into the sunlight and eyed Saddam’s young soldiers, who knows what they were thinking?

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