When the mosque was completed in 2004, it was not just the largest Shia shrine in Syria, bedecked in beautiful, Persian blue tiles, but also an Iranian outpost in the Sunni hinterland, complete with portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei. Raqqawis had tried to stop the construction—these were their saints, their pilgrimage sites. The complex deprived them of their traditions and collective memory. There were no Shias anywhere nearby, but Iranian pilgrims began to flock to the site, clerics from Hezbollah spoke at the mosque, and the Iranian cultural center in Aleppo organized rallies there.
