A sea of Shia sorrow

By Valerie Jones BBC correspondent in Najaf

By the time the coffin arrived at Najaf the four-lane highway to the central mosque was a sea of people.

Some mourners flailed themselves at the funeral

Hundreds of thousands of Shias had travelled to Najaf for the funeral of the ayatollah.

They had come from all over the country parading behind banners, chanting the names of their towns and villages.

The coffin had been loaded onto the back of a truck.

As it edged its way through the crowd thousands of hands stretched out towards it, and there were chants of sorrow at the ayatollah's death.

The mood in Najaf on Tuesday was more calm and more solemn than the anger and outrage of the past few days.

Anger

When I arrived at the holy city the day after the bombing the debris from the explosion still lay all over the square in front of the central mosque, and the anger amongst the crowds was palpable.

They shouted accusations against whoever they thought could be responsible.

But on Tuesday the debris was gone, and the anger muted.

There were still the calls for revenge on banners at the site where the ayatollah died but one Shia cleric summed up what others said to me - that now was a time for unity among all Iraqi people.

There was tight security in the city.

The Iraqi police were there in numbers, but so were the security guards from the Shia religious centre at Najaf.

And some of those guards were armed.

Where was the US?

There is still bitterness against the Americans for, the Shias say, not protecting the ayatollah, even though he had been co-operating with the Americans in developing Iraq's future.

The senior cleric at Najaf, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has said Iraqis must take more control of their own security.

But more militias with guns might not seem the sensible solution.

Ayatollah Baqr al-Hakim had been a focus for the hopes of the Shia community in the building of the new Iraq.

This was the day they came to mourn his killing.

The political implications of his death are still to be resolved.