Three years have passed and nothing has really changed. In an Iraq in the midst of a political stalemate, thousands of demonstrators gathered on Saturday 1er October in Baghdad to mark the third anniversary of an anti-power uprising, launched against elite corruption and mismanagement of public services.
The unprecedented protest, triggered in October 2019, had spread to the poor, predominantly Shiite south. In this oil-rich Iraq, for months hundreds of thousands of demonstrators had pounded the pavement, denouncing youth unemployment, crumbling infrastructure and the absence of democracy. The movement had run out of steam with a repression which had left nearly 600 dead and 30,000 injured, but also the confinement linked to the coronavirus.
Three years later, the situation has not changed. The same parties monopolize political life and, one year after the October 2021 legislative elections, they cannot agree on the choice of a prime minister and a president.
In the evening, the mobilization continued in Baghdad with fewer numbers, but also in the major cities of the South, Nassiriya and Basra, where the protesters threw stones at the police, who responded with tear gas, according to a photographer from Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Tensions around the appointment of a prime minister
“The people demand the fall of the regime”chanted Saturday during the day the thousands of demonstrators, very young for the most part, brandishing Iraqi flags and portraits of “martyrs” of 2019 in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, according to an AFP correspondent. The police fired several rounds of tear gas to prevent protesters from crossing a bridge, where concrete walls blocked access to the Green Zone, a district housing Western embassies and state institutions.
Both sides exchanged stone throws. Bare-chested, young people carried a wounded comrade to evacuate him from the front lines. The clashes in Baghdad left 36 demonstrators injured, mainly suffering from respiratory problems, and 18 in the ranks of the anti-riot forces, according to an official at the Ministry of the Interior.
The commemorations take place in a tense context, the two great poles of political Shiism clashing over the appointment of a prime minister and early legislative elections. The influential Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr calls for an immediate dissolution of parliament. Opposite, the Coordination Framework, an alliance of pro-Iranian Shiite factions, wants the establishment of a government before any election. On Wednesday, rocket fire targeted the Green Zone during a session of Parliament.
Four out of ten unemployed young people
On August 29, tensions peaked when supporters of Sadr clashed with the army and men from Hachd al-Chaabi, former pro-Iran paramilitaries integrated into the regular troops, and who are politically opposed to the Sadrists. More than 30 Sadrist supporters died in these clashes.
Far too absorbed in internal quarrels, politicians show themselves powerless in the face of the multiple crises that are rocking Iraq. Among them, geopolitical tensions: Iran or Turkey, two great neighbours, occasionally bomb Iraqi Kurdistan to weaken armed Kurdish opposition movements there – Iranian or Turkish. On Wednesday, strikes claimed by Tehran left 14 dead and 58 injured.
After decades of conflict, in the absence of economic reforms and major infrastructure projects in a country hit by endemic corruption, unemployment also affects four out of ten young people. And the lives of 42 million Iraqis are impacted by the consequences of climate change, with droughts and water shortages only getting worse.