The al-Askari Shrine at Samarra holds the graves of two of the Twelve Imams and marks the place where, in Twelver Shia belief, history bends toward its end.
Two Imams and a disappearance
The shrine contains the tombs of the tenth and eleventh Imams, Ali al-Hadi and his son Hasan al-Askari, who lived and died at Samarra in the ninth century under the close watch of the Abbasid caliphs whose capital it then was. It also marks, in Twelver tradition, the cellar from which the twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, entered occultation in 874, hidden by God rather than dead, and awaited as the one who will return at the end of time to fill the earth with justice. The shrine therefore holds not merely two graves but the pivot of Twelver eschatology.
Significance and vulnerability
Because the site anchors the doctrine of the awaited Imam, it carries a weight beyond its architecture, and this is why its position mattered so gravely. Samarra has an overwhelmingly Sunni population, and the great Shia shrine standing within it made a target. In February 2006 the shrine's golden dome was destroyed in a bombing, and its minarets in a second attack in 2007; the strikes were understood as aimed at the tradition itself, and they helped push Iraq toward sectarian civil war. The dome and minarets have since been rebuilt.
Restoration and pilgrimage
Restored after the bombings, the al-Askari Shrine again receives Shia pilgrims, particularly on the anniversaries associated with the two Imams and with the occultation. It remains, with Najaf, Karbala and Kadhimiya, one of the principal shrine sites of Iraqi Shia Islam, a place of devotion bound up with the expectation of the returning Imam.