In early December 1995, crowds emerged from the vast Sadr City neighborhood in northern Baghdad, Iraq, and being walking north. Their destination was Imam Hassan al Askari’s shrine in Samarra, more than 100 kilometers away. Taking backroads through date plantations along the Tigris River, they evaded Iraq’s Baathist authorities, who had outlawed the “walking pilgrimages” that traditionally take place to Iraqi shrines on saints’ deaths anniversaries. As large crowds of Shia pilgrims arrived in Samarra, they were greeted by locals in the overwhelmingly Sunni city, who distributed food and drinks as they approached the shrine. The scenes confounded Baathist officials, who sent worried telegrams to police stations across the country demanding surveillance be stepped up to find and arrest pilgrims and those who greeted them. Throughout the 1980s-90s, Iraqi authorities sought to stamp out walking pilgrimages to the tombs of Shia Muslim holy figures, which dot the country. They allowed pilgrims to use cars, but specifically feared the horizontal connections and socialities that the act of walking created. The December 1995 pilgrimage stands out because of the geography involved: an overwhelmingly Shia suburb and an overwhelmingly Sunni city. After the 2003 invasion, US military authorities implemented a political system that positioned sectarian religious identity as central to Iraqis’ civic and political identities. These became increasingly clearcut amidst the 2000s civil war, in which the 2006 bombing of Samarra’s shrine was an iconic moment and trigger. Authorities have since carved up Samarra with concrete blast walls that ensure pilgrims have no contact with locals. In this context, the 1995 pilgrimage points to an earlier moment when a nominally “Shia religious ritual” to a “Shia shrine” became a space for solidarity and defiance of the regime among Iraqis of different sects to be expressed. In this paper, I draw on research in the Baath Party archives and ethnographic fieldwork in Iraq to explore the politics of walking pilgrimages to saints’ tombs before and after the US invasion. I investigate how these spaces challenged repression under the Baathist regime and how they became tied to sectarian identity after 2003. I then argue that the evolution of the Arbaeen pilgrimage since then has created renewed spaces of possibility for horizontal connections, even as sectarian actors constantly seek to assert control over the pilgrimage space and how it is narrated.