On July 8th, a group of young unemployed men gathered around the offices of foreign oil companies in the north of Basra to obtain their right to be employed. The Iraqi security forces violently repressed the demonstration killing Saad Al-Mansuri, a 26 year old father of 3. This mobilized the local population to take to the streets again and the demonstrations soon spread to other major cities in the south. In the first two weeks of protests according the Iraqi Observatory of Human Rights more than a dozen protesters have been killed at the hands of the security forces and various armed groups, more than 600 wounded and 600 have been arrested, many released after being brutalized and threatened. [...]
Prime minister Haider al-Abadi promised to judge the perpetrators while the Interior Ministry described the protests as “serial sabotage”. Through their media channels and statements, the Iraqi political elite is depicting the protesters as “saboteurs” led by “foreign agents” or Baath affiliates without any proof for these accusations.
The Iraqi regime is structured by militarization and is a producer of political and social violence. The various armed groups and militias are deeply connected to the sectarian and corrupt political elite that came to power in 2003. Some of them have been institutionalized after their involvement in the war against the Islamist State in Mosul. Groups such as Hadi al-Ameri’s Iran-backed al-Badr brigades, Qais al-Khazali’s Rightous League, Ammar al-Hakim’s Ashura Brigades, Kataeb Hezbollah or Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, were further normalised through their participation in the general parliamentary elections in May. Leaders of paramilitary forces and militias are now members of the parliament despite being responsible for the threatening, kidnapping and killing of civil society activists and many human rights violations in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq. Some of these groups have also fought alongside the regime in Syria taking part in the ongoing war in the neighboring country. [...]
What distinguished this wave of protest from the one in 2015 is that it is led by ordinary citizens and not by any organized civil society or political group. This lack of a centralized organization made its repression easier for the security forces. In 2015 the protest movement composed of organized civil society groups, part of the Iraqi left and Moqtada al-Sadr’s supporters broke into Baghdad’s Green Zone – the cordoned off and fortified zone of the capital where state institutions are located - and entered the office of the head of the government and the Iraqi parliament , the authorities did not use force against them.
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