- (december 2022)
Iraq in 2022.
Iraq hasn't had a government in ages. It has instead had plenty of demonstrations against the economic crisis. And then it was rocked by bloody fights between
Shiite factions after (in August 2022) Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr announced that he was quitting politics. He used to be an Iranian puppet but later distanced himself from Iran.
Iraq is a real democracy, with regular elections, but its politicians cannot
create stable governments.
In October 2021
parliamentary elections were won by al-Sadr's party and by his two Sunni and Kurdish allies (Mohammed Halbousi's Taqadum party and Masoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party), while the Iranian-backed Coordination Framework, which included Nouri al-Malikis State of Law and the Kurdish Patriotic Union as well as Qais al-Khazali's militia, lost about two-thirds of its seats, and the Alaa Rikabi's Imtidad list of independents born out of the 2019 protest movement won only nine seats out of 329.
During this long political impasse, caretaker prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has been running the country.
The country is far from pacified: in 2021 ISIS carried out an average of 87 terrorist attacks and 149 casualties per month in Iraq.
In August 2022 alone, Iraq was rocked by 22 bomb attacks, six of which resulted in 32 civilians dead.
This is nowhere near the peak of 2014 (20,218 deaths) but Iraq still ranks second behind Ukraine and ahead of Syria and Afghanistan in number of people killed by bombs.
Finally, in 2022 Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani has been chosen as prime minister. The problem is that he is the candidate of the Coordination Framework, the coalition that lost the elections. People say that he was handpicked by Iran.
A visible demonstration of Iran's influence on Iraq's affairs is a new monument near Baghdad's airport: it's a monument to Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Irans Revolutionary Guard who was killed by a US strike in 2020, a terrorist in the USA but a hero among many Iraqi Shiites.
Why Sadr withdrew from politics is anyone's guess, but Sadr's family lives in exile in Iran, and Iran may have threatened retaliation on his family if he blocked the appointment of a pro-Iranian prime minister.
The bottom line is that Iraq has one of the weakest governments in the world,
which also explains why countries like Turkey and Iran feel free to bomb its territory.
In November 2022 alone,
Iran has conducted air strikes on Iraq's Kurdistan
(following a September bombing that killed 14 people)
because it provides sanctuary for Iranian Kurdish armed groups,
and
Turkey has launched air strikes on the same area (but targeting different Kurdish groups) in retaliation for a bombing in Istanbul which Erdogan blamed on Kurdish militants.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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