SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Karbala was not a defeat. This must be understood. Without understanding this, you cannot understand anything about why Iran fights the way it fights,

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2091215482783449436

Karbala was not a defeat.

This must be understood. Without understanding this, you cannot understand anything about why Iran fights the way it fights, with the commitment it has, in the face of what it faces.

In 680 CE, Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, took a small group of seventy-two companions and family members to stand against the army of Yazid at a plain called Karbala. He knew he was going to lose. He knew most of them would die. His companions knew it too. He gave them every opportunity to leave. Some did. Most stayed.

They fought. They fell. Hussein was killed. His head was taken. The women and children were taken prisoner.

By every conventional measure: a defeat. A massacre.

And that defeat has been burning in the hearts of hundreds of millions of people for nearly fourteen hundred years.

Not as a wound to be avenged and then forgotten. As a permanent reference point. As the axis around which a certain understanding of justice and resistance and the willingness to stand for truth regardless of the odds has organized itself for fourteen centuries.

When an Iranian soldier goes to war, he understands himself in relation to Karbala. When an Iranian martyr falls, he understands his fall in relation to Karbala. When the movement suffers losses, it understands those losses in relation to Karbala.

The defeat at Karbala became the spiritual engine of a resistance tradition that has not stopped running since.

The empire has no historical reference point that functions like this. It has no equivalent depth of motivational infrastructure. It has soldiers who are paid and trained and equipped.

Iran has soldiers who believe. These are not the same thing.