The Arba'een walk returns to a corridor Iraq spent a decade demining
British journalist Sulaiman Ahmed describes former ISIS-held ground near Karbala still laced with mines, as millions return to the world's largest annual pilgrimage.
Pilgrims walking toward Karbala on 5 August 2026 stopped at ground that was still mine-contaminated a decade after it fell out of Islamic State control, according to the British journalist Sulaiman Ahmed, who joined the route alongside the Iranian cultural outlet Sobh Festival and posted dispatches from the road at 12:19 and 12:21 UTC.
The walk matters because it is the largest annual gathering on earth, a Shia religious observance that, in most years, draws somewhere between fifteen and twenty million pilgrims across Iraq on foot, in a forty-day build-up that culminates on the twentieth of Safar. The 2026 edition comes with a complication that is harder to see on a livestream: parts of the corridor were held by Islamic State during the 2014–2017 occupation, and the demining effort has not finished. Ahmed's pinned post described an area that "was previously controlled by ISIS" and noted that "there are mines everywhere."
What pilgrims walk through
Ahmed's dispatch published at 17:09 UTC on 4 August 2026 described a stop at "former ISIS strongholds," where "some areas had mines" and "the heat was also intense." The Sobh Festival account framed the footage with a harder claim: that pilgrims on the walk were seeking revenge for US atrocities. The framing is contestable, but the on-the-ground descriptions are not: an outside observer moving through the corridor is reporting a landscape that Iraqi demining agencies have been working through since the territorial defeat of the caliphate.
Two facts frame this year's route. First, the human scale: the Arba'een pilgrimage has, since the post-2003 reopening of the shrines in Najaf and Karbala, overtaken the Hajj in terms of foot traffic, with rough counts consistently above the ten-million mark and peak years closer to twenty. Second, the security layer: routes that pass through Salah ad-Din, Nineveh and parts of Anbar provinces traverse territory that has been cleared in patches, partially cleared, or untouched, depending on the village, the wadi and the year. UNMAS, the UN mine action service, has logged the persistence of IED and mine contamination in retaken areas across the same period. Ahmed's footage sits inside that longer record rather than outside it.
The Sobh Festival framing
Sobh Festival, the Iranian-backed cultural channel that published Ahmed's videos, has used his presence to advance a political claim about the pilgrimage: that the pilgrims are walking in anger at the United States. The framing recasts a religious observance as a foreign-policy message. It is worth naming this clearly, because the same video evidence (a pilgrim walking past signage, through a former ISIS-held stretch, in extreme heat) carries a simpler, more verifiable reading: that Iraq's demining effort is still incomplete and that the Arba'een route is one of the most public-facing ways to see that incompleteness.
This publication's reading is that the framing layered onto the footage by Sobh Festival is at least partly instrumental, while the on-screen description Ahmed himself writes (former ISIS territory, mines, heat) is consistent with what Iraqi mine action and humanitarian agencies have said about the corridor for years. The geopolitical claim travels; the demining fact stays.
Why the route still matters
The Arba'een walk is not a metaphor. It is a logistical operation, a small economy, and a piece of Iraqi statecraft. Iraqi federal authorities coordinate tent cities, water points, medical stations, and route security in the weeks before the walk; the route between Najaf and Karbala is roughly eighty kilometres, but feeder routes stretch into Basra, into Maysan, and across the Iranian border at Mehran and Shalamcheh. Millions of Iranians walk in. Local private hospitals along the route offer free services for the duration; mourning processions feed pilgrims; small shops stock cheap goods. The pilgrimage is one of the few Iraqi institutions in which Shia religious authority, federal government logistics, and Iranian cultural patronage have to coexist, and it does so because the demand is real and the route is open.
The mines are the complication. In 2024, the Iraqi Directorate of Mine Action, supported by UNMAS, reported continued clearance operations in districts that overlap with parts of the pilgrimage feeder network. Some routes are re-routed each year to bypass uncleared cells. Local media have carried repeated stories of shepherds and pilgrims injured by legacy ordnance on the edges of the route. Ahmed's August 2026 dispatches are a Western traveller's confirmation of the same pattern: the corridor that Iraqi officials call safe for mass movement is also a corridor that contains, here and there, the residue of the 2014–2017 war.
What remains uncertain
Two points are not resolved by the available material. The first is the geographic specificity. Ahmed names Karbala and former ISIS territory, but the available source items do not specify the exact segment of the walk he filmed in, the demining status of that segment as logged by Iraqi authorities, or whether the visible mine-risk signage in the footage corresponds to a recorded clearance cell. The second is the wider safety claim. Sobh Festival's framing, that pilgrims "seek revenge for US atrocities," is not corroborated by the four source items currently in hand, and is best read as a political layer the outlet placed on top of travel footage rather than as an empirical claim.
The honest read of Ahmed's August 2026 dispatches is narrower than the packaging. A British journalist walked the Arba'een route in August 2026 and found former ISIS-held ground, mines, and punishing heat. The Sobh Festival account put a sharper political frame around that footage. The pilgrimage is happening, the demining is incomplete, and the corridor between Najaf and Karbala is again, for another year, the most public stage Iraq has for showing both.
Desk note: Monexus read the four available dispatches from Sulaiman Ahmed and the Sobh Festival account directly. Where the footage and the framing diverge, the body of the article reports the on-screen description and treats the geopolitical claim as a separate, contestable layer.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/2084978040916869536
- https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/2084977469623349582
- https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/2084688256046682216
- https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/2084687824230441177