After two months of protest, the Iraqi parliament accepted Sunday, December 1, the resignation of the government of Adel Abdel Mahdi. The head of the Assembly also said he would ask the President of the Republic to appoint a new Prime Minister.

The vote comes two days after Adel Abdel Mahdi announced his intention to resign, soon after Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's highest Shiite authority, called for his replacement after two months of demonstrations mourning for more than 420 dead.

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At the same time, the popular mobilization against the Iranian power and its godfather continues, in the southern Shiite but also in the north Sunni, hitherto kept apart.

Police officer sentenced to death

On Sunday, for the first time since the protests began, a police officer was sentenced to death for killing two protesters in Kout, south of Baghdad.

The authorities, who have since October 1 accused "unidentified gunmen" of targeting indifferent protesters and security forces, have recognized in places "excessive use of force".

They also sacked in a few hours a soldier they had dispatched to "restore order" in Nassiriya, the home town of Adel Abdel Mahdi, but who opened the doors of chaos on Thursday.

Men in civilian clothes pulling on the crowd

The tribes of the holy shiite city of Najaf, also entered a spiral of violence tried, Sunday, to intercede for the shooting stops.

Near the mausoleum of a tutelary figure of a Shiite party, men in plainclothes fired on demonstrators who have already burned part of the building. After the death of twenty people, many under the fire of these men, residents fear that the situation does not degenerate further.

The resignation of the government is only a "first step", repeated the protesters in the squares of Baghdad and major cities in the south.

Day of mourning

In Tahrir and elsewhere, day parades have turned into funeral processions, including in Mosul, the big Sunni city in the north, where hundreds of students dressed in black gathered.

The Sunni provinces, taken over from the Islamic State group two years ago, had been kept away from the movement so far. If their inhabitants complain of the same evils as in the south, they dread being accused of being nostalgic for the power of Saddam Hussein or that of the jihadists, accusations already made elsewhere against the demonstrators by their detractors.

Eight southern Shiite provinces have observed this loss. Local authorities have even declared a day off for civil servants.

With AFP