H o l a k uʼ s R e t u r n 10 the great Mongol empire, he set out in about 1253 with a Mongol army of about 130,000 and launched an attack on Iran. Holaku crushed the last resistance there by the end of 1256, when he destroyed the assassin fortress at Alamut. The Assassin (an Ismailite sect) where the product of dynastic strife among the Fatamids, who were the heads of the Shiite Ismailite movement and had set up a rival Caliphate in Egypt in opposition to that of the Abbasids in Baghdad. After the death of Fatimid Caliph Al Mustansir (1094), Hassan -e- Sabah, the Assassin leader, and other Ismailities in Iran refused to recognize the new Fatimid caliph in Cairo and transferred their allegiance to his deposed elder brother Nizar. There thus grew up the sect of the Nizari Ismailites, who were at odds with the Fatimid caliphs in Cairo and were also deeply hostile to the Abbasids. In 1090 Hassan and his followers had captured the hill fortress of Alamut near Qazvin in Iran. The following 150 years the Assassin leaders commanded from this stronghold a network of propagandists in Iran, Iraq and later Syria, a corps of devoted suicide attackers and an unknown number of agents. Soon the Assassin was claiming many victims among the generals and statesmen of the Abbasid Caliphate, including two caliphs. Assassin power came to an end as the Mongols under Holaku captured Assassin’s castles in Iran one by one until 1256 Alamut itself fell.
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