Two days after the Iraqi prime minister announced his intention to step down, the parliament accepted Sunday 1st December the resignation of the government of Adel Abdel Mahdi in a mourning Iraq, including in the Sunni regions hitherto remained apart from the protest, while the violence has made a new death in Baghdad.
The assembly, which met on the first day of the week, announced that it would ask the President of the Republic, Barham Saleh, to appoint a new prime minister. In the meantime, Mr. Abdel Mahdi (77), an independent without a partisan or popular base who came to power thirteen months ago, remains in his position to manage current affairs.
The vote comes immediately after Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the country's highest Shiite authority, called for the replacement of Abdel Mahdi after two months of protests against power and his Iranian godfather; a mobilization mourned by more than four hundred and twenty dead, thousands of wounded and violence that continued on Sunday.
Policeman sentenced to death
For the first time in two months, a police officer was sentenced to death on Sunday for killing two protesters in Kout, south of Baghdad. The authorities, who have been accusingst October "Unidentified shooters" aiming indifferently at protesters and security forces, recognized in some places a "Excessive use of force".
They also sacked in a few hours a soldier they had sent for "Restore order" in Nassiriya, the home town of Mr. Abdel Mahdi, but which opened the doors of chaos on Thursday. Calm returned Saturday night in this city, after its recovery in hand by the tribal dignitaries who brought out their fighters in arms.
On Sunday, the tribes of the holy Shiite city of Najaf, also entering a spiral of violence with the fire on Wednesday evening of the consulate of Iran, tried to intercede for the shooting stops. There, around the mausoleum of a tutelary figure of a Shiite party, men in civilian clothes fired on the demonstrators who had burned part of the building. After the death since Thursday of twenty people, for many under the fire of these men, residents fear that the situation does not degenerate further.
"A first step"
The resignation of the government is only one " first stage "the protesters repeated on Sunday in the squares of Baghdad and major cities in the south of the country. The parades of the day turned into funeral processions, including in Mosul, the big Sunni city of northern Iraq, where hundreds of students dressed in black gathered.
The Sunni provinces, taken over from the Islamic State (IS) organization two years ago, had been kept out of the movement so far. If their inhabitants complain of the same evils as in the South, they fear being labeled as nostalgic for the power of Saddam Hussein or that of the IS, accusations already made elsewhere against the demonstrators by their detractors.
But after two months of protest, Zahra Ahmed, a student of odontology in Mosul, believes that "It's the minimum that('they) pow(Ent) to do (…) for the martyrs of Nasiriyah and Najaf ", two southern cities where nearly seventy protesters have been killed in the past three days. On Friday, another Sunni province of Salahaddin, north of Baghdad, had declared three days of mourning. On Sunday, eight southern Shiite provinces also mourned. Local authorities have even declared a day off for civil servants.
Although Parliament approved the resignation of Adel Abdel Mahdi's government, for the protesters, it is the entire political system installed by the United States after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 – and now under Iranian control – that it must change. They demand the complete renewal of a political class that has already evaporated in corruption the equivalent of twice the gross domestic product (GDP) of one of the world's richest oil countries.
