PRAYAGRAJ, India (AP) — Millions of Hindu devotees, mystics and holy men and women from all across India flocked to the northern city of Prayagraj on Monday to kickstart the Maha Kumbh festival, which is being touted as the world’s largest religious gathering.

Over about the next six weeks, Hindu pilgrims with gather at the confluence of three sacred rivers — the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati — where they will take part in elaborate rituals, hoping to begin a journey to achieve Hindu philosophy’s ultimate goal: the release from the cycle of rebirth.

Here’s what to know about the festival:

A religious gathering at the confluence of three sacred rivers

Hindus venerate rivers, and none more so than the Ganges and the Yamuna. The faithful believe that a dip in their waters will cleanse them of their past sins and end their process of reincarnation, particularly on auspicious days. The most propitious of these days occur in cycles of 12 years during a festival called the Maha Kumbh Mela, or pitcher festival.

The festival is a series of ritual baths by Hindu sadhus, or holy men, and other pilgrims at the confluence of three sacred rivers that dates to at least medieval times. Hindus believe that the mythical Saraswati river once flowed from the Himalayas through Prayagraj, meeting there with the Ganges and the Yamuna.

Bathing takes place every day, but on the most auspicious dates, naked, ash-smeared monks charge toward the holy rivers at dawn. Many pilgrims stay for the entire festival, observing austerity, giving alms and bathing at sunrise every day.

“We feel peaceful here and attain salvation from the cycles of life and death,” said Bhagwat Prasad Tiwari, a pilgrim.

The festival has its roots in a Hindu tradition that says the god Vishnu wrested a golden pitcher containing the nectar of immortality from demons. Hindus believe that a few drops fell in the cities of Prayagraj, Nasik, Ujjain and Haridwar — the four places where the Kumbh festival has been held for centuries.

The Kumbh rotates among these four pilgrimage sites about every three years on a date prescribed by astrology. This year’s festival is the biggest and grandest of them all. A smaller version of the festival, called Ardh Kumbh, or Half Kumbh, was organized in 2019, when 240 million visitors were recorded, with about 50 million taking a ritual bath on the busiest day.

Maha Kumb is the world’s largest such gathering

At least 400 million people — more than the population of the United States — are expected in Prayagraj over the next 45 days, according to officials. That is around 200 times the 2 million pilgrims that arrived in the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage last year.

The festival is a big test for Indian authorities to showcase the Hindu religion, tourism and crowd management.

A vast ground along the banks of the rivers has been converted into a sprawling tent city equipped with more 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 restrooms. Divided into 25 sections and spreading over 40 square kilometers (15 square miles), the tent city also has housing, roads, electricity and water, communication towers and 11 hospitals. Murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures are painted on the city walls.

Indian Railways has also introduced more than 90 special trains that will make nearly 3,300 trips during the festival to transport devotees, beside regular trains.

About 50,000 security personnel — a 50% increase from 2019 — are also stationed in the city to maintain law and order and crowd management. More than 2,500 cameras, some powered by AI, will send crowd movement and density information to four central control rooms, where officials can quickly deploy personnel to avoid stampedes.

The festival will boost Modi’s support base

India’s past leaders have capitalized on the festival to strengthen their relationship with the country’s Hindus, who make up nearly 80% of India’s more than 1.4 billion people. But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has become an integral part of its advocacy of Hindu nationalism. For Modi and his party, Indian civilization is inseparable from Hinduism, although critics say the party’s philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.

The Uttar Pradesh state, headed by Adityanath — a powerful Hindu monk and a popular hard-line Hindu politician in Modi’s party — has allocated more than $765 million for this year’s event. It has also used the festival to boost his and the prime minister’s image, with giant billboards and posters all over the city showing them both, alongside slogans touting their government welfare policies.

The festival is expected to boost the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s past record of promoting Hindu cultural symbols for its support base. But recent Kumbh gatherings have also been caught in controversies.

Modi’s government changed the city’s Mughal-era name from Allahabad to Prayagraj as part of its Muslim-to-Hindu name-changing effort nationwide ahead of the 2019 festival and the national election that his party won. In 2021, his government refused to call off the festival in Haridwar despite a surge in coronavirus cases, fearing a backlash from religious leaders in the Hindu-majority country.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Ukraine captured two wounded North Korean soldiers who were fighting on behalf of Russia in a Russian border region, South Korea’s intelligence service said, confirming an account from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday.

Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) told AFP it has “confirmed that the Ukrainian military captured two North Korean soldiers on January 9 in the Kursk battlefield in Russia.”

The confirmation comes after Zelenskyy said in a post on the Telegram messaging app that the two captured North Korean soldiers were wounded and taken to Kyiv, where they are communicating with Ukrainian security services SBU.

SBU released video that appears to show the two prisoners on beds inside jail cells. The authenticity of the video could not be independently verified.

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A doctor interviewed in the SBU video said one soldier suffered a facial wound while the other soldier had an open wound and a lower leg fracture. Both men were receiving medical treatment.

In this unverified photo shared by the Ukrainian military, an apparent captured North Korean soldier with injuries is lying in a bed inside a cell. (Ukraine Military handout)

SBU also said one of the soldiers had no documents at all, while the other had been carrying a Russian military ID card in the name of a man from Tuva, a Russian region bordering Mongolia.

Ukraine’s military says North Korean soldiers are outfitted in Russian military uniforms and carry fake military IDs in their pockets, a scheme that Andrii Yusov, spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, says could mean Moscow and “its representatives at the U.N. can deny the facts.”

Despite Ukrainian, U.S. and South Korean assertions that Pyongyang has sent 10,000 – 12,000 troops to fight alongside Russia in the Kursk border region, Moscow has never publicly acknowledged the North Korean forces.

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While reports of their presence first emerged in October, Ukrainian troops only confirmed engagement on the ground in December.

On Thursday, Zelenskyy put the number of killed or wounded North Koreans at 4,000, though U.S. estimates are lower, at around 1,200.

Soldiers are seen at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Oct. 12, 2020.  (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin, File)

Despite North Korea’s suffering losses and initial inexperience on the battlefield, Ukrainian soldiers, military intelligence and experts suggest first-hand experience will only help them develop further as a fighting force.

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“For the first time in decades, the North Korean army is gaining real military experience,” Yusov said. “This is a global challenge — not just for Ukraine and Europe, but for the entire world.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The avalanche broke away around 12.30pm on the eastern face of Punta Valgrande, a summit in the Leopontine Alps, on the border between Italy and Switzerland.

The skiers who died were dragged down the snowy mountain for several hundred metres from where they had been skiing at over 2,800 metres. The bodies have not yet been recovered because they are awaiting authorisation from the local magistrate.

An alert had been issued in the area above 2,100 metres, which warned of “considerable danger of avalanches.” The alert was at level 3, with 5 being the most dangerous.

It is not yet clear whether the rescuers were alerted by a skier who saw the avalanche sweeping away three people, or by the other two people who managed to save themselves. According to reports, the group was going uphill with crampons and then descending with skis.