The ISIS Crisis: What You Really Need to Know by Charles H. Dyer & Mark . Tobey

Author:Charles H. Dyer & Mark . Tobey [Dyer, Charles H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2015-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

ANCIENT RUINS, MODERN SIGNIFICANCE

Yet Samarra’s significance runs much deeper. The city was founded in AD 836 by an Abbasid caliph who moved his capital here from Baghdad. For fifty years Samarra ruled the Islamic world until a later caliph moved the capital back to Baghdad. The al-Askari Mosque contains the mausoleums of the tenth and eleventh Shiite Imams, and Samarra was the place where the twelfth and final Imam (the Mahdi) went into hiding. That makes the al-Askari Mosque one of the holiest sites for Shiites. Yet most inhabitants of Samarra are Sunnis. The city is part of the “Sunni triangle,” that region in Iraq where most Sunni Arabs live.

The people of Samarra endured a major international conflict in the eighteenth century. The Battle of Samarra in 1733 would decide the fate of the entire region. In that monumental nine-hour struggle, seventy thousand Persians fought against eighty thousand Ottomans. The Ottomans almost lost the battle when two thousand Kurds in their army fled. But the Ottomans held on to defeat the Persian army, break the siege of Baghdad, and retain control of the region. That victory, however, came at a steep price. By the end of the day, fifty thousand soldiers from the two sides had been killed or wounded.

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