Sadr supporters stage sit-in in front of Iraq’s top judiciary

Several hundred supporters of Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr launched a sit-in before Iraq’s top judiciary on Tuesday, escalating tensions in a showdown with a rival Shia coalition.

Acting Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi cut short his visit to Egypt, where he was due to attend a five-nation summit, to return home to monitor developments.

Kadhemi “calls on all political parties to calm down and seize the opportunity for national dialogue to pull the country out of its current crisis,” his office said in a statement.

The standoff between rival Shia factions has sparked a deepening war of words, but no violence so far.

The Sadrists, who have been camping outside the parliament for three weeks, pitched their tents outside the gates of the judicial authority’s headquarters in Baghdad, AFP correspondents reported.

They carried placards calling for the dissolution of parliament and new elections, 10 months after an inconclusive poll failed to produce a majority government.

Although his political bloc has participated in previous governments and secured top posts in government ministries, Sadr himself has managed to stay above the political fray and is hailed by his supporters as an outsider dedicated to fighting a corrupt elite.

“We want to eradicate corruption,” said Abu Karar al-Alyawi, a Sadr supporter among the protesters on Tuesday.

“The judiciary is being blackmailed or maybe corrupt.”

On August 10, Sadr gave the Supreme Judicial Council a week to dissolve parliament to end the political deadlock, but the council ruled it lacked the power to do so.

In light of Tuesday’s protest, the council announced it would suspend work until further notice.

Police are stationed in large numbers around the headquarters, which, unlike Parliament, is outside Baghdad’s high-security government and Green Zone diplomatic compound.

Sadr’s opponents in the so-called Coordination Framework, who have held their own sit-in outside the Green Zone, want an interim government before new elections are held.

These include former paramilitaries from the Tehran-backed Hashed al-Shaabi network and the party of ex-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a longtime Sadr enemy.

Last week the prime minister convened crisis talks with party leaders, but the Sadrists boycotted them.

Since the US-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has been governed by a sectarian power-sharing system that reserves the prime ministerial post for the country’s majority Shia community.

The Sadrists insist that after emerging as the largest bloc in parliament in the 2021 election, the constitution will be amended to give it the right to appoint the prime minister, something their opponents staunchly oppose.

The continued failure of rival Shia factions to form a government in a country plagued by ailing infrastructure and crumbling public services has fueled growing public frustration.

Iraqis, used to daily power outages that last much of the day, are now also facing water shortages as droughts ravage parts of the country.

Despite its oil wealth, many Iraqis are stuck in poverty and about 35 percent of young people are unemployed, according to the United Nations.