🇮🇷 In the account Muslims mourn each year at Ashura, Imam Husayn was surrounded at Karbala in 680 CE with a small band of family and followers, cut off from water under the desert sun. The army of the Umayyad caliph Yazid gave him a choice: pledge allegiance to a ruler he deemed illegitimate, or die. He chose to fight. 🔸“The illegitimate one, son of the illegitimate one, has forced me to choose between the sword and humiliation,” the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson is famously said to have declared that day in 680 CE. “And far be it from us to accept humiliation. Never shall we submit to humiliation.” 🔸 He was killed, and his stand became the foundational martyrdom narrative of Shia Islam. 🔸 On Thursday, millions marked his death in the holiest day of mourning in Shia Islam, and a day synonymous with resistance to oppression. It carried added weight this year as the first Ashura since the US-Israeli war and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28. 🔸 Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims filled the streets around Husayn’s golden-domed shrine in Karbala, Iraq, one of the largest annual gatherings on earth 🔸 In Iran, black-clad mourners marked the day across Tehran with processions, chest-beating, and elegies across shuttered cities 🔸 President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi joined different public ceremonies, Pezeshkian writing that Husayn taught people “neither to oppress, nor accept oppression, nor remain silent before it” 🔸 Iran's Parliament Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf took part in a mourning ceremony at the Imamzadeh Saleh Shrine in northern Tehran. He said in dealing with Washington, Iranians would resist “oppression and excessive demands” by drawing on “the culture of Ashura,” as negotiations continue with Washington. (🎥 via @PressTV)