https://youtu.be/krNHE-mMwIA
The unpredictable Shi’ite leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, s in a dramatic statement, he warned his followers that he would disown them if they didn’t stop rioting inside parliament and other government buildings inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, put down their weapons and return home within the hour. Al-Sadr’s threat to his followers was issued on Tuesday, following the deaths of 30 people the evening before in clashes between his supporters on one side and government security forces and pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias on the other. So far, the cease-fire is mostly holding, but only until the next spark is ignited, which will no doubt not take long. Iraq is in the midst of the longest and most difficult power struggle it has endured since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Ten months after elections were held in October 2021, the politicians have failed to reach an agreement on the choice of a president or prime minister. Under the constitution, at the head of the state presides a presidential council composed of the Kurdish president, a Sunni deputy and a Shi’ite deputy. The president, chosen by parliament, then appoints a prime minister that the Shi’ite factions have agreed upon. The speaker of parliament is a Sunni Muslim. The structure closely resembles Lebanon’s. The chief obstacle to naming a president lies in the inability of the two big Kurdish factions – one led by the Barzani family, which controls the presidency of Iraq’s Kurdish enclave, and the other led by the Talabani family, whose members have customarily served as presidents of Iraq (currently Barham Salih) – to reach an agreement on a candidate. This year, the Barzani family decided to disrupt the process by demanding that the next president come from within its ranks. Without an agreed-upon president, there’s no prime minister and no cabinet; the country is ruled by a caretaker government headed by Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, an effective leader and former journalist who once headed Iraqi intelligence. Al-Kadhimi maintains good ties with the United States, Saudi Arabia and Iran and has succeeded in navigating through Iraq’s complicated domestic politics. Al-Kadhimi even played a role in this year’s dialogue between Iran and Saudi Arabia regarding the possibility of restoring relations.
But the dispute between the Kurdish factions is only a sideshow to the main struggle. On the face of it, it’s war between Shi’ite and Shi’ite: between the coalition of pro-Iran Shi’ite parties that go under the name the Coordination Framework in partnership with the Talabani family, and a coalition constructed by al-Sadr that won 73 of the 329 seats in parliament in the last election. The largest political bloc in Iraq, it has found allies in the largest Sunni movement and the Barzani family.
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Aged 48, al-Sadr’s power rests on his religious and family pedigree. He is the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr, who was the revered leader of young Shi’ites and the lower classes and was assassinated, along with two of his sons, by Saddam Hussein. Muqtada al-Sadr is the nephew of the Shi’ite philosopher and legal scholar Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, who was also murdered by Saddam’s agents, in 1980. Muqtada al-Sadr sees himself as the heir to the family dynasty, the national and religious leader of Iraq’s “downtrodden and the oppressed” Shi’ites, the one who will actualize his father’s teachings and his uncle’s philosophy. However impressive his pedigree may be, al-Sadr doesn’t have the supreme religious authority conferred on the designated grand ayatollahs. The time he spent on religious studies in Iran was insufficient to achieve that status, as much as he aspired to it, let alone to capture the prize of senior Shi’ite spiritual leader, which today is held by the 92-year-old Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Whatever al-Sadr lacks in formal religious credentials is compensated for by his political power, which he deploys through the private militias he has cultivated since the U.S. invasion. Back then, his political agenda centered on opposition to the American presence in Iraq, with Iran acting as his key supporter. Eventually, he changed sides, positioning himself as opposed to all foreign interference in Iraq, including Iran, which challenged al-Sadr’s power by using its own militias that eventually became a parallel military competing with Iraq’s official one. Al-Sadr’s armed forces have often clashed with the other Shi’ite militias, especially during violent clashes with Iraqis in the south of the country protesting the lack of water and electricity. The protestors not only blamed the government in Baghdad for the power shortages, but also Iran, which supplies about 40 percent of Iraq’s natural gas and electricity. The protesters claimed that Tehran was rationing supplies to pressure the Iraqi government. Al-Sadr understood how to mobilize anti-Iran sentiments and direct them against the Shi’ite political parties in Iraq that rely on Iranian support. His overwhelming victory in October’s election made it clear to Tehran that it risked losing control of its most important asset if al-Sadr succeeded in his goal of appointing a prime minister from his bloc. Iraq’s Supreme Court ruled that the current parliament had been elected legally and that there was no reason to dissolve it, al-Sadr ordered his lawmakers to resign and leave their offices while hundreds of his supporters broke into the Green Zone and seized control of the parliament building and other government offices. They staged a sit-in strike and clashed with government forces and rival Shi’ite militias. After several days, al-Sadr ordered his followers to leave the parliament building, partly in order to enable a parliamentary debate on legislation ensuring nutritional needs – al-Sadr didn’t want to be seen as blocking a law that aims to help his constituents and, no less, to help himself and his movement. Without an approved state budget for the 2022/23 fiscal year, the government of Iraq can’t touch the $115 billion of oil earnings it is expected to earn this year. Legally, each month the government can spend only one-twelfth of the money it spent in the previous year’s budget. The law being weighed by parliament would have authorized a new budget to help compensate Iraqis for the surge in global food prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and would have made a $1.6 billion payment owed to Iran for electricity and gas purchased by Iraq. The on al-Sadr was particularly high because Iran had threatened to cut off supplies of power and gas, and had even begun the technical procedures to do so, if it wasn’t paid. While parliament approved some $17 billion for the special budget, only half of the sum was allocated for the purposes specified in the law. The rest will, in theory, go to funding current operations in the provinces, but in practice it will be used by local officials to boost their support and pay for the private militias. Al-Sadr, who is also sharing in the financial benefits of the law, authorized his lawmakers to support it. Only after it was approved on June 13 did his 73 members of parliament quit. NN: Syria is getting close by the day to an all out Shiite Sunni civil war. And oil exports by both sides will be attacked.