The popular movement threatened to escalate protests across Iraq if the authorities did not announce within a week a mechanism for a popular referendum to choose a new prime minister, while the Shiite authority condemned violence against protesters.
Maan Al-Jabri, coordinator of the protests of Dhi Qar province in the south of the country - the Anatolia Agency - said that the sit-in of Habboubi (Dhi Qar) agreed with the sit-in squares of the central and southern governorates and the Tahrir Square in Baghdad, with a referendum to be held for the position of prime minister.
Al-Jabri said that the sit-in areas agreed to give the government, the election commission and the judiciary a week to announce the mechanism by which the referendum will be held, to come out with a unified position from the next prime minister.
Al-Jabri added that the sit-in squares will nominate non-controversial and non-partisan personalities, in line with the directives of the religious authority in Najaf, and it must have a national consensus, and it will be submitted to the official authorities for presentation in the popular referendum.
For his part, the coordinator of the protests of Diyala, Kamel al-Jubouri, told Anatolia, that contacts were held Friday night between the sit-in squares in Baghdad and the central and southern governorates of the country, and a popular referendum was agreed to end the crisis over the prime minister candidate.
For his part, the supreme authority of the Iraqi Shiites, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, on Friday condemned the violence that claimed the lives of protesters in the city of Najaf, and said that any new Iraqi government should gain the trust and support of the people.
Sistani, in the words of his representative during Friday prayers in the city of Karbala, called on Iraqi security forces to protect peaceful protesters from further attacks.
Sadr Square, the protest center in the Iraqi province of Najaf, south of Baghdad, witnessed the confrontations of the past days between demonstrators and members of what are known as the "blue hats" of the Sadrist movement, killing 11 and wounding 122 others.
Al-Jazeera correspondent said that calm prevailed in the square and the surrounding areas, which witnessed since the early morning hours the arrival of the demonstrators who refused to appoint Muhammad Tawfiq Allawi as prime minister, succeeding the resigned Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi.
Iraq has been witnessing unprecedented protests since the beginning of October 2019, interspersed with violence that left more than 600 people dead, according to the country's President Barham Salih and Amnesty International.
The protesters are demanding an honest independent prime minister who previously did not hold high positions, far from subordination to parties and other countries, as well as the departure and accountability of all political elites accused of corruption and waste of state funds, which have governed since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.