Tahrir Square, April 2016. Image: Zahra Ali. All rights reserved.Last month, I returned to Iraq to both visit my family and present the findings of my doctoral thesis on women’s political activism in Iraq to my friends and colleagues in Baghdad. I also wanted to investigate grassroots civil society activism in Iraq; my visit could not have been timelier. When I arrived, Baghdad had been rocked by a sit-in – started on 18 March – in front of the concrete T-walls that encompass the Green Zone, where the main central government building, foreign embassies and Iraq’s new political leadership all reside. Everyone was talking about the fact that Moqtada al-Sadr had just joined the sit-in, giving the government a week to dissolve itself and designate new, technocratic representatives, chosen for their competence not their affiliation to communal-based parties.
Demonstrators denounce the sectarian and corrupt nature of the post-invasion political system in Iraq.
However, al-Sadr’s participation is only a recent chapter in a popular protest that began on 31 July 2015. Launched by ordinary citizens and political activists in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and across Iraq, this movement has expressed the citizenry’s general exasperation at the corruption and mismanagement of the post-2003 government; corruption and mismanagement epitomised by electricity cuts and a lack of public services. These protests quickly turned into a massive popular movement – supported even by the prominent religious figure Ayatollah Sistani – vilifying Iraq’s post-invasion regime and demanding radical reforms. Every Friday since, demonstrators have gathered in the main public squares of Iraq’s big cities – Najaf, Nasryah, Basra, etc. – and echoed the slogans of the protestors in central Baghdad: “Bismil din bagunah al-haramiyah” (in the name of religion we have been robbed by looters) and “Khubz, hurriyah, dawlah medeniyah” (bread, freedom and a civil state). Demonstrators denounce the sectarian and corrupt nature of the post-invasion political system in Iraq, which has institutionalised ethno-religious quotas and empowered an incompetent and self-interested political elite mainly hailing from exile and conservative Shi’a Islamist groups.
