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Updated: May 6, 2025
Ali was assassinated near Nejef, which city is sacred to his memory, and his son Husein was killed at Kerbela; so these two cities are the greatest of the Shiah shrines. The Turks belong almost without exception to the Sunni sect, whereas the Persians and a large percentage of the Arabs inhabiting Mesopotamia are Shiahs.
The night before we were to start, word came in that the political officer at Nejef had been murdered, and the town was in revolt. We were ordered to send a section there immediately, so Lieutenant Ballingal's was chosen, while the rest of us left next morning with the balance of the battery for Hit.
Kerbela and Nejef, in the quality of great Shiah shrines, had never been particularly friendly to the Turks, who were Sunnis but the desert tribes are almost invariably Sunnis, and this coupled with their natural instinct for raiding and plundering made them eager to take advantage of any interregnum of authority.
Kerbela and Nejef are the great places of burial for the faithful, and among the common sights of the plains of Mesopotamia are endless caravans of corpses from the Persian hills or from the distant north.
These contained much information about the Arab situation, and through them it was all but proved that the German was the direct instigator of the murder of the political officer at Nejef. An amusing sidelight was thrown in the letters addressed by Arab sheiks through this agent to the Kaiser thanking him for the iron crosses they had been awarded.
The dead are often conveyed hundreds of miles to be interred in Nejef and Kerbela. Peters' Nippur, ii. 325, 326. See below, p. 597. Koldewey, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, ii. 406 seq. Ib. Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana, chapter xviii. Peters' Nippur, ii. 234. Other mounds examined by Peters between Warka and Nippur bear out the conclusion.
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