How
Moqtada al-Sadr Could Take Down Iraq’s
Government
Supporters of the powerful Shia cleric stormed
Baghdad’s parliament, leaving legislators
quivering in the basement and Iraq on the edge
of political chaos.
By Michael Weiss and Abdulla Hawez
May 03,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Daily
Beast"
-
BAGHDAD,
IRAQ — Hussain Jassim refused to leave the Green
Zone, once considered the impenetrable citadel
at the heart of Baghdad, until his leader
Muqtada al-Sadr ordered him to do so. “We
have entered parliament and we have broken it’s
prestige in front of people because they are
thieves, they deserve for that to happen to
them,” Jassim told The Daily Beast.
He was
one of thousands of angry protestors who on
Saturday raided the Iraqi legislature, chasing
MPs out of their own seats in government, and
often assaulting or denouncing those not aligned
with al-Sadr trying to run away from the melee.
“We saw them fleeing from us,” Jassim said.
Some
legislators stayed behind, trapped in the
basement of the parliament for fear of not
wanting to confront the angry crowd outside.
There were even false reports that a few had
repaired to the sprawling U.S. embassy complex,
seeking refuge from their own countrymen.
Remarkably, Iraq’s security forces tolerated the
demonstrators day-long occupation of a notorious
no-go area in the capital. The protesters
climbed over concrete blast walls and burst
through cordons with ease. Some tear gas was
used, but law enforcement mingled comfortably
with those against whom they were meant to
guard. “The security forces have dealt with us
with a high sense of patriotism and
responsibility,” Jassim said.
These
protests were a long time going. Iraq’s public
coffers are a sieve, where billions have
vanished in the salaries of “ghost soldiers” or
into the bank accounts of well-connected pols
and their kin. Problematic enough in peacetime
and during high global oil prices, economic
crisis is 2016 has become a national security
crisis, as state bankruptcy could easily damage
or end the ongoing war against the Islamic
State.
For
months, al-Sadr, the
firebrand Shia cleric al-Sadr threatened to
take direct action if Iraq’s parlous political
establishment could not rid itself of cancerous
corruption. Once a deadly foe of U.S. soldiers,
al-Sadr has become, five years after America’s
somewhat abortive military withdrawal, Iraq’s
new political kingmaker, unafraid to antagonize
a Shia-led government whose premier was
appointed with the backing of both Washington
and Tehran.
Among
the Sadrists’ demands are early elections,
genuine anti-corruption reforms (this, in a
country where even anti-graft officials
openly admit to being on the take), and an
end to the political quota system, whereby
government posts are decided according to sect
and ethnicity—a holdover of America’s
transitional stewardship of post-Saddam Iraq and
once thought of as a sufficient underwriter of
pluralism.
Many on
Saturday behaved as if another despised tyranny
were coming to an end. In one iconic photograph
taken by Jean-Marc Mojon of Agence France-Presse,
a young Iraqi boy is shown diving into a pool
inside the Green Zone, his plunge pose mimicking
the famous fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue in
2003, which symbolized the collapse of his
Baathist regime.
Majid
Gharawi, an MP from the Ahrar parliamentary
list—Sadr’s bloc—justified the protests as a
normal and healthy reaction to legislative
deadlock after three attempts of Prime Minister
Haider al-Abadi to form a technocratic cabinet
were rebuffed by a parliament which internally
devolved into the kind of chaos that descended
upon the institution from without this weekend,
with MPs getting into fist fights and waging
their own sit-ins over the past several weeks.
Haider
al-Mullah, a member of the Sunni Alliance of
United Forces, called on al-Abadi to resign. The
prime minister, al-Mullah told The Daily Beast,
“moved the crisis from government and his
coalition to parliament.”
In a
press release the Kurdish Alliance condemned the
ransacking of “the parliament building, which
represents the nation and the assault on the
second deputy speaker of parliament Aram Shekh
Muhammed and some other Kurdish members of
parliament and MPs from other blocs.” According
to Hiwa Afandi, the Head of Department of
Information Technology of the Kurdistan Regional
Government in Erbil, all Kurdish MPs were
ordered to remove themselves from Baghdad.
A state
of emergency was declared Saturday, as Shia
militias under the command of Badr Organization
leader Hadi al-Amiri were mobilized to ensure
that the Islamic State didn’t take advantage
advantage of the unrest—or, better say, further
advantage of it.
On Sunday,
the
Islamic State detonated two car bombs in
Samawah, a city about 120 miles south of
Baghdad, killing at least 32. Samawah, which is
majority Shia, had mostly been immune to the
depredations of the army of terror which two
years ago stormed into the northern provincial
capital of Ninewah and conquered about a third
of Iraq’s territory.
In recent
months, the so-called caliphate has seen a
series of major tactical defeats in Iraq and
Syria and the loss of swaths of held terrain. As
a result, it has amplified opportunistic acts of
terrorism. The question, however, is whether
crippling dysfunction in Baghdad can prevent or
withstand these from tearing the country apart.
An earlier Islamic State bombing on Saturday,
this one of Shite pilgrims in the Nahrawan
district close to Baghdad, killed two dozen.
The
occupation of the Green Zone may have been
lifted, as of Sunday evening, but the stability
and cohesion of the state are still very much in
doubt. One of the protest organizers, Akhlas al-Obaidi,
has given the government less than a week to
broker a solution; otherwise, she said, the
protestors would return on Friday.
“The
Iraqi politicians have tried many times
procrastinating people’s demands which are
calling for reform,” Mudahir al-Lamy, another
protestor, told The Daily Beast. “Yesterday, we
sent a clear message to them that they have no
place in the new Iraq. They have stolen our
money, so today we ask them to be held
accountable and put them in prison.”
Rreporting by Abdulla Hawez from
Baghdad and Michael Weiss from New York.
Abdulla
Hawez is a reporter for
Yalla, an Erbil-based Iraqi news
organization.
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