The battle of the Sadrist movement and the protesters in Iraq ... Lay off with charity or hold on to a favor?

"... No, to the one who takes his money and trades in the name of freedom." He managed to pressure them to remove the song from some social media.

This was not the first incident in which the clash between the two parties, which at one point shared the arenas of protest, intensified. Rather, they went further through the political alliance through the "Sairoun" coalition, which won the most votes in the 2018 elections, before it broke apart and turned into disagreements. Deep, some of them reached an armed clash in some of the protest squares, such as Najaf, Baghdad and Nasiriyah.

Muqtada al-Sadr changed his rhetoric in support of the protest movement after the killing of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces and commander of the Iranian Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani, in an American raid near Baghdad airport in early January 2020.

Khashan said that Al-Sadr changed his political rhetoric towards the protesters after the assassination of the engineer and Soleimani (communication sites)

Change of speech

Basem Khashan, an independent politician close to the protest movement, says, “Al-Sadr deliberately changed his political rhetoric towards the protesters in the wake of the assassination of Muhandis and Soleimani, in an attempt to woo the hesitant public from the followers of the armed factions to compensate for what he would lose from the crowd of the movement or the civilian public that elected him in The year 2018, before the man turned against all his reform promises that he made before the elections.

Al-Sadr Movement had won 54 seats through the "Sairoun" coalition in the 2018 elections, compared to 32 in the 2014 elections.

Khashan added in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net, "Al-Sadr deliberately increased the gap with the popular movement and insisted on adopting a hostile rhetoric to isolate the impact of the protests, which coincided with the desire of most of the Shiite forces that pushed to provoke this conflict and strengthen it to strip al-Sadr of his influence that he had before the protests with the aim of Weakening him, and he did not, as usual, dealt with statesmanship with this essential variable. "

The Sadrist movement announced earlier its intention to run in the elections with the aim of obtaining the presidency of the next government, and in an interesting statement by the Sadrist MP, Ghaib Al-Omari, in which he confirmed that "the next prime minister will be a duck driver," and the duck is a name Iraqis use for a Toyota Crown car used by armed groups. Days of sectarian violence in 2006 to launch its attacks, which angered many segments of Iraqi society.

Nasiriyah ... the

space of Al-Haboubi and # Jaysh_Alakhni pic.twitter.com/6dsIljMnQg

- Lina-Al Bayati 🇮🇶💕🇸🇪 (@ Liino101) February 12, 2021

A laugh me army

On the other hand, the protesters continued an apparently organized attack on Al-Sadr and his supporters, in which all means were used, especially the communication sites, to respond to Al-Sadr's tweets and confront his supporters. The hashtag "Army made me laugh" remained at the forefront of the local trend on Twitter for two days, which is one of the methods he devised Bloggers to address the Sadrist attack, prominent bloggers tweeted with this tag in a wave of waves of raging conflict between the two sides for quite some time now.

Barakat Karim wrote on his Twitter page, "When the symbolism of the October protests and their victims is overridden by the power parties and their supporters, the protesters have no choice but to mock and reduce the opposite opinion and nude it in front of society by pressing the laugh me button."

"Sarcasm is the last resort for the simple peoples, the army of laughing me is a model," Muhammad Al-Bassel wrote, while Maan Al-Jizani stressed that the soft power of the protesters proves its effectiveness and succeeds in creating public opinion through sarcastic criticism.

The soft power of the Iraqi youth of October proves its effectiveness and succeeds again in creating public opinion and perpetuating the momentum of protest and cynical criticism.

#My_family

- Maan ALJizzani (@maanaljizzani) February 12, 2021

Last week, the elements of the so-called Peace Brigades, the armed arm of the Sadrist movement, displayed their military arsenal in the streets of the capital, Baghdad, and the governorates of Najaf and Karbala, thus blocking alleys and streets, imposing an armed cordon on these areas, in a scene that put the government and security forces in trouble.

Al-Obaidi considered that some of the protesters deviated in unfortunate directions such as violence and vandalism (Al-Jazeera)

External agendas

The spokesman for the Sadrist movement, Salah al-Ubaidi, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net that “Sadr’s supporters were and still support the protest movement that targets the corrupt and calls for reform, but we believe that the momentum of the protests, in part, has diverted in unfortunate directions such as violence, sabotage and assault on all public property, and that they call us. To stand against these phenomena. "

Al-Obaidi added that the popular movement did not preserve its purity that it started with, but was penetrated by political forces and external agendas, and they are the ones that push and even lead in some cases to provoke chaos and target specific parties, stressing that the Sadrist movement did not and will not covet the mass of the movement for political gain. Rather, it tries to continue the momentum of reform without offending the state and the rule of law, as he put it.

Observers believe that there are regional and internal powers trying to fuel this raging conflict between the two parties, because the matter will necessarily weaken the role of Al-Sadr in the coming stage and will force him to return to the normal size of the number of his seats, which ranges between 30 and 35.

The researcher in political psychology, Dr. Faris Kamal Nazmi excludes this hypothesis, and tells Al-Jazeera Net that he does not tend to have a third party, but believes that there are political dynamics and concepts that explain the essence of these phenomena, the most important of which is the emergence of the popular movement as a fierce competitor for Sadr in occupying a large part of the protest space that It was controlled by man in the past years.

Nazmi points out that this protest bloc tends to abolish the sacred, sanctification and belief in the national curriculum and reject all the outcomes of the political system. Indeed, it does not trust any behavior that emerges from the political forces, even if it is close to them or in their interest.

Nazmi added, "After the first month of protests, Al-Sadr did not understand the clear demands of the demonstrators to change the political system and to turn against the reform slogan that it raises, which is a watershed moment for him because he insists on the singularity of reform while preserving the structure of the political system from which it gains its power and influence and may remain in it. Form. "

The protest movement contributed to the establishment of a number of new political entities and parties preparing to contest the upcoming elections, which are entities funded by donations from their members and some sympathizers with them, but it is unclear whether they are able to compete with the influential parties that control and control political power, the media and political money, and some of them receive On arms and the armed factions, which often appear stronger than the regular forces.