‘We wanted a reason for people to come back’: Lebanese city marks Ashura after destruction of war

As the procession wound its way through mounds of rubble, the crowd chanted and beat their chests, their lamentations echoed by the dull thud of shelling in the foothills just beyond the city. “This the tragedy of Karbala, O Imam Hussein, look. This is the tragedy of Karbala,” the crowd cried in the opening procession of Ashura, in the city of Nabatieh, southern Lebanon . The religious ceremony of Ashura mourns the slaying of the holy figure Imam Hussein in the battle of Karbala in 680; today, it is a symbol for Shia Muslims of resistance against oppression. In normal times, the annual commemoration is the pride of Nabatieh, drawing crowds of up to 30,000 people who march through the streets and fill them with a collective cry of grief. This year, the story of Karbala took on a renewed meaning for attenders because of the Hezbollah-Israel war, which killed more than 3,900 people in Lebanon, most of whom were Shia Muslims. Nabatieh was one of the hardest-hit by bombings during the war, and much of it was levelled. On Wednesday, the cries of sorrow were muffled by the mounds of earth and snarled metal that had been cleared from the roads two days earlier. The 200 or so people could not fill the silence that hung over the city, its streets empty and its buildings shattered after 100 days of war. Israeli bombings and forced evacuation orders displaced almost all of the city’s population of 80,000. …