A Violently Restive Middle East
"[The attack on the [Iranian] consulate was] a brave act and a reaction from the Iraqi people. We don’t want the Iranians."
“There will be revenge from Iran, I’m sure."
"They’re still here and the security forces are going to keep shooting at us.“
Ali, Iraqi demonstrator, Najaf, Iraq
"Do not give them cover to end your revolution, and stay clear of religious sites."
"[If the government does not resign], this is the beginning of the end of Iraq."
Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
“We don’t know who Adel Abdul Mahdi [Iraq's Iran-backed Prime Minister] is, he did not come through elections."
"We want all of the government to resign, we don’t want parties, so this step of Adel [agreeing to resign, as demanded by protesters] means nothing, they are trying to fool us and then they will replace him with someone worse."
Abu Mohammad, 45, construction worker, Baghdad
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| Scores of protesters take to the streets in the Iraq capital, Baghdad. Dozens have been shot in a wave of violence, including the torching of Iran’s consulate. Photograph: Khalid Mohammed/AP |
Security forces in Iraq using live fire, shot 35 protesters dead on Thursday when demonstrators stormed and torched an Iranian consulate overnight in Najaf, a Shiite holy city. In Nasiriya troops opened fire on demonstrators who had blocked a bridge on Thursday before dawn. According to police and medical sources, dozens of other protesters were wounded. In fact, since the protests began the death toll clocks in at 354 Iraqis killed and no fewer than eight thousand Iraqis wounded.
Security forces in Baghdad opened fire with live ammunition and rubber bullets near a bridge over the Tigris River where four other Iraqi citizens were killed. Thousands of mourners in Nassiriya crowded the streets in defiance of a curfew, to bury the dead in the wake of the mass shooting. Protesters cheered as flames billowed from the Iranian consulate in the night. Years of Tehran's meddling in Shiite Muslim affairs in Arab states have come to roost for the Republic.
Not only is Iran itself struggling with its own inner protests with Iranians compelled to crowd their own streets with protests against their corrupt government whose international sanctioned status has enormously weakened the oil-rich state's economy causing food shortages and sky-high prices for fuel, food, medicines that people teetering on the edge of insolvency cannot afford.
They are out protesting their government's lavish spending in support of their proxy terrorist militias abroad, their government's interference in the affairs of their neighbours.
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In Iraq, one of the most violent days of bloodshed followed the torching of the consulate, reduced to charred ruins after its overnight misadventure at the hands of outraged Iraqis. Accusing the Iraqi authorities of turning against their own people to defend Iran, the protesters refuse to accept the half measures to placate their demands that the resignation of the prime minister now represents to them.
They want assurances that the entire government apparatus will resign, that Iran will no longer have its malign presence in their country.
"All the riot police in Najaf and the security forces started shooting at us as if we were burning Iraq as a whole", a witness to the consulate destruction stated, refusing to identify himself by name. The attack was condemned by Iran's foreign ministry, demanding "the Iraqi government's firm response to the aggressors". Even as the firm response of the Iraqi government continued to create more deaths, in defence of Iranian aggression in Iraq.
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What former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to accomplish when his troops attacked Iran and the seven-year Iran-Iraq war commenced -- at a cost of 500,000 wasted lives sacrificed to a sectarian war launched by the Sunni-led Baathist government, concerned that its majority Shiite population would be infected by the Islamic Republic's revolutionary Islamism foisted on Iran by fundamentalist Ayatollahs enforced by the Iranian Republican Guard Corps -- was finally accomplished thanks to U.S. intervention in Iraq to remove Saddam, opening an opportunity for Iran to theocratically contaminate Iraqi Shiites.
The fly in that ointment is the Iraqi Shiites' ultimate renunciation of Iranian-style Islamist government.
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Labels: Demonstrations, Iran, Iraq, Islamism, Protests, Revolts, Shiites, Violence
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, November 30, 2019
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