Al-Sadr-Coordination Framework faceoff goes on

Baghdad remains trapped by the confrontation between Iraqi nationalist cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr and Iran-aligned Coordination Framework. If the face-off continues, commentators fear violence could erupt as tempers fray in the sweltering Iraqi capital.

Sadr’s followers have been camped out for three weeks in the building housing the Iraqi parliament and its garden in the fortified Green Zone with the aim of preventing the legislature from meeting and launching the process of government formation. Sadr has called for the dissolution of the assembly and fresh elections.

Rival Coordination Framework supporters have responded by declaring a strike and gathering and setting up tents near the July 14th suspension bridge in Baghdad with the aim of denying Sadr control of the streets. To avoid clashes, Sadr cancelled a “million man march” last Friday although his supporters in and around parliament held a “pray-in” to demonstrate possession of the area.

Nearly ten months after the October parliamentary election, the dominant Shia camps have not only been unable to agree on the formation of a government but also on the form a government should take. The Sadrists insist that the new government should break with the practice of establishing consensus governments representing all key factions and, instead, form a majority government.

A coalition of factions from pro-Iranian Shia militias, the Coordination Framework insists on sticking to the consensus model which has brought Iraq to its knees. If such a cabinet could be cobbled together, it would be minus the Sadrists who resigned from parliament in June.

The Sadrists argue that consensus cabinets have failed to deliver good governance, an end to rampant corruption, economic wellbeing and freedom from US and Iranian intervention in Iraq’s affairs. While Sadr approached influential militia leaders several months ago to join a majority government, they remained true to the Coordination Framework led by ex-Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. The Coordination Framework fears losing power by being in the opposition. Coordination Frame- work leaders also reject Sadr’s demand for the dissolution of militias — their power base. He has already disbanded one unit of his own armed forces.

The confrontation began when the Coordination Framework put forward Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani for the premiership. He is a close associate of Maliki who is Sadr’s bitter foe. This amounted to an awkward pre-emptive strike since a president had to be chosen before the name of a prime minister was put forward. However, disputes between the two main Kurdish factions prevented the installation of a president. Dhiaa Al-Asadi, a leading Iraqi academic and politician, told Amwaj media that the division between Sadr and the Coordination Framework harks back to the post-occupation return of largely pro-Iran Iraqi exiles: “on the backs of US tanks,” my Iraqi friends say. The returnees rivalled Iraqi politicians who had stayed at home during the reign of President Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) and were well acquainted with the developments in Iraq during the 1980s and 1990s..

The scion of a distinguished Iraqi clerical family whose father, uncle, two brothers and in-laws were killed during Saddam Hussein’s rule, twenty-nine-year-old Sadr launched his political career in 2004 by forming the Mahdi Army militia to resist the occupation instead of embracing it. Although he has, since, cooperated to a certain extent with Iran and has spent time in the Iranian Shia holy city of Qom to brush up on his clerical credentials, Sadr remains an independence-minded Iraqi nationalist.

Asadi also makes the point that Sadr has strong support in the south and poor urban areas like Sadr City in the capital. Therefore, the intra-Shia divide also involves socio-economic class.

Asadi holds that Sadr has not altered his position since the occupation. He said the presence of the occupation was “not suitable for the formation of any government.” Sadr criticised the occupation constitution written by people who had not been in Iraq for decades. Sadr opposed the division of Iraqi into Shias, Sunnis and Kurds and the imposition of the Lebanese sectarian model of governance.

According to the Iraqi version, the president is always a Kurd, the prime minister a Shia and the assembly speaker a Sunni. Sadr calls for good relations with neighbours but rejects their interference in Iraq’s affairs.

As Sadr’s party won 73 seats in the 329-member assembly, the Sadrists and potential coalition partners should have been first to form a government. However, key constituent members of the Coordination Framework, which had lost most seats, claimed that the election was fraudulent. After recounts were made, this was disproven. Parliament convened in January and elected a speaker but Coordination Front members boycotted further sessions and denied a quorum of two-thirds of the members to launch the process of choosing a president who would name a premier.

The selection of a president should have been a simple matter. Since the first post-occupation government was formed, the president had been from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

The PUK and its rival the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) had reached an agreement which gave the national presidency to the PUK while the KDP held the prime ministership of the autonomous Kurdish region.

However, following the 2021 election, the Sadrists aligned with the KDP which had 31 seats and, despite the intra-Kurdish deal, it demanded the federal presidency. The Coordination Framework partnered with the PUK with 17 seats. The KDP’s insistence on putting forward its one candidate deepened an already serious rift between the PUK and KDP and has blocked the process of government formation.

Thanks to the intra-Shia and intra-Kurdish deadlocks, Sadr ordered his deputies to resign from parliament, escalating the crisis. Sadr now insists there should be a new election which would ban sitting politicians from standing, inject fresh blood into Iraqi politics, revise the constitution, end the ethno-sectarian system, and insist on independent Iraqi decision-making. On these demands, he should have the support of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who took to the streets in the October 2019 revolution. But, the street has, so far, been unable to make policy.

Some figures in the Coordination Framework accept new elections but reject Sadr’s demands which would overthrow the dysfunctional regime inherited from the US occupation.