![\"\"](\"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/sadr-2.webp\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Ten months after the October 2021 parliamentary elections, Iraq is still mired in a political impasse that turned deadly Monday after\u00a0Moqtada al-Sadr announced his resignation from politics. Supporters of the\u00a0powerful cleric clashed with followers of rival Shiite parties, plunging Iraq into a crisis that could draw in regional powers.\u00a0FRANCE 24 looks at the various players jostling for power.<\/p>\n
Tensions have soared in\u00a0Iraq\u00a0following\u00a0al-Sadr’s shock resignation announcement on Monday, with the cleric’s supporters\u00a0storming the government palace\u00a0in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.<\/p>\n
Despite the imposition of a curfew, the violence showed no signs of abating on Tuesday, with the death toll mounting to at least 23, according to medics.<\/p>\n
Unable to agree on forming a new government and appointing a new prime minister, two very different manifestations of political\u00a0Shiism\u00a0have been locked in a bitter\u00a0impasse\u00a0since the October\u00a0elections.<\/p>\n
On one side is al-Sadr, a nationalist cleric and the biggest winner in the polls, who had hoped to put one of his allies in place as prime minister\u00a0after forming a coalition with\u00a0other religious communities.<\/p>\n
On the other\u00a0is the pro-Iran\u00a0Coordination Framework, an umbrella group of several parties including that of ex-PM\u00a0Nuri al-Maliki, and the Conquest Alliance, the political wing of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, a former paramilitary group.<\/p>\n
FRANCE 24 takes a closer look at the main Shiite actors driving the\u00a0political contest.<\/p>\n
Al-Sadr\u00a0underlined just how powerful he is in the parliamentary elections\u00a0when his party won the most seats, with 73 MPs.<\/p>\n
He was long known in Iraq as the son of Ayatollah Mohammed Sadek al-Sadr, the champion of militant Shiism, whom former president Saddam Hussein\u00a0assassinated in 1999.<\/p>\n
But al-Sadr won infamy in the West in the 2000s as the leader of the Mahdi Army, the militia that fought against US troops occupying Iraq.<\/p>\n
After his strong showing in the October\u00a0polls, he wanted to form a majority with his allies from two Sunni groups, Azm and Taqadom, as well as Masoud Barzani\u2019s Kurdistan Democratic Party. But Iraq was left with the current deadlock instead.<\/p>\n
The populist cleric is adored by his political base, which sees him as the standard-bearer of Iraqi nationalism. But the 48-year-old\u2019s detractors point to his frequent U-turns.<\/p>\n
Given his popularity, al-Sadr has refused\u00a0to cede power to his\u00a0rivals and seems\u00a0confident that he can avoid doing so, assuming\u00a0that he would perform well if\u00a0new elections were held.<\/p>\n
Al-Sadr demanded that his MPs resign in June, leaving his opponents to try to form a government. The cleric then\u00a0sent his supporters to\u00a0occupy parliament on July 30, where they remained for nearly a week before moving their sit-in to its grounds.<\/p>\n
In particular, the Sadrist protesters were railing against the political candidacy of Mohamed Chia al-Soudani, whom al-Sadr\u2019s rivals had put forward for prime minister.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, al-Sadr said he was giving the judiciary a week to dissolve parliament.<\/p>\n
Mohamed Chia al-Soudani is a seasoned politician hailing\u00a0from Iraq’s political elite. The\u00a0former governor of southern Missane province, he has also served in several ministerial roles, notably as minister for employment and social affairs between 2014 and 2018.<\/p>\n
The 52-year-old al-Soudani is taking on a new role as the preferred candidate of the Coordination Framework, the alliance of pro-Iranian Shiite groups facing off against al-Sadr\u2019s camp.<\/p>\n
Al-Soudani left the parliamentary coalition of former PM al-Maliki, with whom he is close, in December 2019. He now faces off against both men\u00a0as he vies for renewed influence in Iraqi politics.<\/p>\n
Widely described as “Iran\u2019s man in Baghdad”, the 68-year-old al-Ameri wields enormous influence in Iraqi politics. Analysts say the two people who really have the power to lead Iraq out of its impasse are al-Ameri and al-Sadr, his great rival.<\/p>\n
The former transport minister first rose to the fore in 2014\u00a0when then PM\u00a0al-Maliki gave him a role overseeing the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group in eastern Iraq, presumably at Tehran\u2019s behest.<\/p>\n
Al-Ameri also saw his Badr militia \u2013 originally formed by Iran in 1982 during the Iraq-Iran war,\u00a0then made up of Iraqi Shiites exiled in Iran \u2013 effectively integrated into a powerful paramilitary organisation, the Popular Mobilisation Forces, which allowed him to impose himself as a key player in Iraqi politics.<\/p>\n
In the 2018 legislative elections, the Popular Mobilisation Forces\u2019 political arm, the Conquest Alliance, won 48\u00a0of Iraq\u2019s parliamentary seats. This put the bloc in second place behind al-Sadr\u2019s political group.<\/p>\n
But these days the Popular Mobilisation Forces are not so popular. Many Iraqis blame them for the killings and kidnappings of protesters against the country\u2019s entire political class in late 2019. As such, the Conquest Alliance was left with just 17 MPs in the 2021 polls.<\/p>\n
Al-Ameri is disputing the results through both protests and legal avenues, and refuses to give up power to the Sadrists.<\/p>\n
The 72-year-old is one of the major figures of Iraq\u2019s post-Saddam era.\u00a0Al-Maliki\u2019s\u00a0eight-year tenure as prime minister came to an end in 2014 when he lost the support of\u00a0allies in Tehran, Washington,\u00a0and\u00a0 indeed, within his own Shiite faction in the Iraqi parliament.<\/p>\n
Al-Maliki\u2019s many detractors accuse him of worsening Iraq\u2019s instability during his tenure \u2013 with some saying his authoritarian and sectarian approach alienated Iraqi Sunnis and thereby fuelled the rise of the IS group. At the time, al-Sadr even called him the \u201cnew Saddam\u201d.<\/p>\n
But al-Maliki remains influential due to his alliance with al-Ameri, which makes him a leading player in the Coordination Framework\u2019s tug-of-war with al-Sadr\u2019s bloc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ten months after the October 2021 parliamentary elections, Iraq is still mired in a political impasse that turned deadly Monday after\u00a0Moqtada al-Sadr announced his resignation from politics. Supporters of the\u00a0powerful cleric clashed with followers of rival Shiite parties, plunging Iraq into a crisis that could draw in regional powers.\u00a0FRANCE 24 looks at the various players […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":182297,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10221280388112155_325455220908133":"","twitter_917774835383787521_917774835383787521":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182296"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182298,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182296\/revisions\/182298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}