Over 2.5 million devout Shiite Muslims are attended the annual Ashura ceremonies in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala, the
provincial governor said on Saturday as the week-long event drew to a close.
Huge crowds had packed the streets of Karbala, many beating their backs with metal chains in rituals commemorating the killing of Imam Hussein by armies of the Sunni caliph Yazid in 680.
Karbala, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Baghdad, was heavily guarded as devotees from across the Muslim world passed through multiple
security checkpoints to reach the focus of their pilgrimage -- two shrines, one to Imam Hussein and the other to his half-brother Imam Abbas.
" Over 2.5 million
people have come to Karbala for Ashura," Akil al-Khazali told a press conference. "There have been no security violations so far and the ceremonies have gone ahead without incident."
"We are preparing buses to take people home," he added. The ceremonies have been targeted by Sunni insurgents in the past and on Thursday a suicide bomber blew himself up at an Ashura procession outside a mosque in Baquba, 60 kilometres (35 miles) north of Baghdad, killing eight people.
On Saturday two people were also killed and seven wounded in a roadside bomb attack on an Ashura event in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said.
Separate street battles in the southern cities of Basra and Nasiriyah killed at least 66 people, police said, in fighting on Friday and Saturday between members of a Shiite messianic sect and Iraq''s security forces.
In Karbala, vast crowds started their long journeys home after sombre processions in which men, accompanied by drummers, beat their chests and engaged in the devotional self-flagellation that characterises Ashura rituals.
On Friday night, there was an re-enactment of the battle of Karbala in which Imam Hussein, who has come to symbolise courage in the face of tyranny and oppression, was killed.
Tradition holds that Hussein was decapitated and his body mutilated by Yazid''s armies. To express remorse and guilt for not saving Hussein, Shiite volunteers flay themselves with chains or slice their scalps during processions to the two shrines.
Last August a pilgrimage in Karbala became a bloodbath when police and gunmen of the Mahdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed at the two holy shrines.