The New York Times:

By Alissa J. Rubin and Farnaz Fassihi

KARBALA, Iraq — The annual ceremony commemorating a founding figure of Shiite Islam is one of the most important religious celebrations in the Shiite world, drawing millions of pilgrims to the holy city of Karbala, Iraq.

This year, the Arbaeen ceremony was also a political skirmish — the latest test of Iran’s power in Iraq and of Iraq’s increasing desire for independence from its powerful neighbor.

Iran, the largest Shiite Muslim country in the world and a regional powerhouse in the Middle East, saw the pilgrimage that ended Saturday as an opportunity to assert its role in Iraq and send a message about its regional reach.

“Arbaeen is a display of power for Iran and a showcase of unity among Shiites in the region,” said Hossein Sulaimani, the editor in chief of Mashregh, a newspaper affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Iran contributed tents, bathrooms and hospitals along the pilgrimage route, supplementing those erected by Iraq, to aid the estimated 15 million pilgrims, nearly one in four of them from Iran. It released inspirational videos claiming credit for saving Shiite shrines from destruction by the Islamic State.

But when Iran said it would send tens of thousands of police officers into Iraq to provide security for the event, Iraq drew the line.

Iraqi authorities welcomed the aid to the pilgrims but blocked the police force, which would have been seen as a humiliating display of Iranian authority.

“Our forces which defeated Daesh are capable of securing the pilgrimage and we don’t need any foreign forces to enter Iraq to police it,” Lt. Gen. Saad Maan, the Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman, said last week, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

The rejection of Iranian security was a small but clear effort to limit Iran’s footprint in Iraq.

Since American-led military forces overthrew the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, empowering Iraq’s Shiite majority, a crucial question for Iraq and the region was the extent to which it would fall under the sway of Iran, the Shiite theocracy to the east.

Iran gradually expanded its influence in Iraq through a web of political parties, Shiite clerics and militias, and it invested heavily in Shiite religious cities like Najaf, Karbala and Samarra.

When the Islamic State seized a third of the country in 2014, Iran rushed to Iraq’s aid, backing militias that, with the help of Kurdish and American forces, drove the jihadist group out.

Iran sees Iraq as its literal gateway to regional influence — the first stop on a land bridge to its proxies in Syria and Lebanon. More recently, Iraq has been critical to Iran’s survival of painful American economic sanctions, thanks to an American waiver allowing it to buy oil and gas from Iran. Iraq is also a major customer for Iranian goods that are not under sanction, including food and construction materials. 

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