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Powerful Iraqi Shiite preacher Moqtada Sadr Sunday urged other factions to support a protest that has seen his followers occupy parliament in a dispute over who should name the next prime minister.
Nearly 10 months after elections, the oil-rich country is still without a new government due to the repeated failure of negotiations and the en-masse resignation last month of Sadr’s bloc—the largest in parliament.
Despite tear gas, water cannon and temperatures that touched 47 degrees Celsius (116 degrees Fahrenheit), his followers stormed the legislature on Saturday after pulling down heavy concrete barricades on roads to Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, home to government buildings and embassies.
The health ministry said at least 100 protesters and 25 security personnel were hurt in the confrontation, prompting the European Union to express concern over “escalation”.
On Sunday, the protesters—who had bedded down overnight with blankets—appeared in no mood to leave, as volunteers distributed soup, hard-boiled eggs, bread and water.
“We were hoping for the best but we got the worst,” said one of the protesters, Abdelwahab al-Jaafari, 45, a day labourer with nine children. “The politicians currently in parliament have brought us nothing.”
In multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Iraq, government formation has involved complex negotiations since a 2003 US-led invasion toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
Analysts have said Sadr, a mercurial cleric who once led a militia against US and Iraqi government forces, is using protests to signal that his views must be respected in establishing a new government, amid a power struggle between his bloc and rival Shiite factions.
Sadr on Sunday took to Twitter to laud a “spontaneous revolution in the Green Zone—a first step,” he said, towards “an extraordinary…
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Source : france24
