Cleric’s Role Reversal Upends Iraq’s Political Order
Political uproar over corruption pulls attention, resources from fight against Islamic State
Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr inside his tent just inside the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad on Sunday. Photo: wissm al-okili/Reuters
There, beyond the checkpoints, razor wire and bomb-sniffing dogs, lie the country’s government and parliament, foreign embassies and the homes of most of the people who matter in the new Iraq.
That new Iraq is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt nations. And now that its economy is melting down amid low oil prices, popular rage with the Green Zone’s inhabitants has become a major—and potentially destabilizing—force just as the country begins to roll back Islamic State.
“Iraqi people have seen no change for the better since 2003,” when Saddam Hussein was toppled, “and the Green Zone is the heart of this corruption, a place where all the thieves hide behind the tall walls,” said Sheik Qasem al-Mayahi, a tribal leader from a suburb of Baghdad who is camping out with fellow protesters at the entrance to the sprawling enclave.
For several months, protesters like him have demanded that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi dismantle the networks of political patronage that hollow out government institutions and punish the ministers and other officials complicit in frittering away Iraq’s oil wealth. Initially, such protests united Iraqis of all stripes.
Amazingly, this movement to clean up government and end sectarian quotas has now been taken over by a man who, to many, symbolizes some of the worst excesses of post-2003 Iraq: the mercurial cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The 42-year-old scion of a leading Shiite religious family, Mr. Sadr is far from an outsider. He controls a large parliament faction, with several ministers, and one of the country’s largest Shiite militias, which he calls the Peace Brigade. A decade ago, he also led an insurgent campaign against U.S. forces in Iraq and was responsible for unleashing some of the worst sectarian bloodshed.
“Yes, the people are ready to rise up,” said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a former deputy prime minister and leading Sunni politician. “But Muqtada al-Sadr’s ministers were probably the most corrupt of all the ministers. Now he wants to get rid of sectarianism and corruption—but he was part of it all.”
For weeks now, Mr. Sadr’s supporters have been camping in tent cities at entrances to the Green Zone. Friday rallies draw hundreds of thousands of protesters who, on one occasion, came close to breaching the enclave’s perimeter. Turning up pressure on Mr. Abadi, Mr. Sadr himself traveled to Baghdad from his home in Najaf and set up a tent for himself and his bodyguards inside the Green Zone.
So far, these protests have been peaceful. But Mr. Sadr has repeatedly hinted at his readiness to escalate. Most recently, he said that “we won’t remain handcuffed” if the Iraqi parliament doesn’t act on his demands when it meets Thursday.
His main one is for Mr. Abadi to fire the current government and name instead a “technocratic” administration from the roster his movement has selected. While Mr. Abadi promised a cabinet shuffle in February, it is unclear to what extent the political parties in parliament, which traditionally apportion cabinet positions according to sectarian and ethnic quotas, would allow him to do so.
“Reforms are very important for us. But Muqtada al-Sadr is exploiting the critical situation just to gain popularity and to pressure the prime minister into giving him more power,” parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri said in an interview. Several important political blocs have already said they oppose Mr. Sadr’s requests.
To many critics of Mr. Sadr, the protest movement is a particularly ill-timed distraction from the war against Islamic State, also called ISIS, which has stepped up a bombing campaign in predominantly Shiite areas and controls Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and many other Sunni towns. The government has had to pull elite forces from the front lines to help protect the Green Zone.
“This is a huge diversion from our main fight against ISIS. We need to mobilize all our resources toward getting them out of the country. But now each and every one is holding their breath to see whether the demonstrators storm the Green Zone, which represents the sovereignty of the state,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a prominent parliament member and former national security adviser. “This is an extremely dangerous game.”
That isn’t an argument that sways Mr. Sadr’s supporters, who point out that Islamic State managed to score its blitzkrieg victories in 2014 because of graft and incompetence in the upper echelons of the Iraqi army.
“The reason why we have ISIS is the corruption in the political process, the inability of the government to protect Iraqi borders, the inability of successive governments to deal with extremism,” said Dhiaa al-Assadi, the head of the Sadrist bloc in the Iraqi parliament. “To fight ISIS, we also need to reform the political process.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
