A pilgrimage bridge crossing near Kadhimiya became the site of one of the deadliest single-day disasters in modern Iraqi history, when a rumour, not an attack, triggered a fatal stampede.
A shrine built up across centuries
The shrine's twin golden domes and minarets, honouring Imam Musa al-Kadhim and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad, developed and were expanded over many centuries into the elaborate complex now standing in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad, a major destination for Shia pilgrims within Iraq and from abroad.
The 2005 bridge stampede
In August 2005, a false rumour of a suicide bomber among a crowd of pilgrims crossing the al-Aimmah bridge near Kadhimiya during a religious commemoration triggered a mass stampede, and the resulting crush and, in many cases, drowning in the Tigris River below killed close to a thousand people, one of the deadliest crowd disasters recorded anywhere in the twenty-first century, caused entirely by panic rather than by any actual attack.
As this entry's companion article covers
The meaning of the epithet al-Kadhim, "the one who restrains anger," attributed to the elder of the two Imams honoured at the shrine, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.