Police snipers fired at demonstrators in Baghdad Friday, as the death toll rose to 60 people in three days of violent national protests against government corruption.
Premier Adel Abdul-Mahdi called for calm but protesters scorned his promises of political reform.
The country’s most influential preacher pinned the blame for the violence on politicians who had failed to improve the lives of the public, and ordered them to meet the protesters’ demands.
Another politically powerful preacher pulled his opposition faction’s lawmakers out of Parliament, a gesture likely to fuel the passions behind the unrest.
On the streets of Baghdad, police appeared to be targeting individual protesters. Reuters reporters saw one fall to the ground after being shot in the head. He was pronounced dead in hospital.
Elsewhere, a Reuters television crew saw a man critically wounded by a gunshot to the neck after snipers on rooftops opened fire at a crowd.
The violence is the worst since Iraq put down an insurgency by Daesh (ISIS) two years ago. The protests arose in the south, heartland of the Shiite majority, but quickly spread, with no formal leadership.
Security and medical sources gave a death toll Friday of 60 killed across Iraq in three days of unrest, the vast majority of the deaths in the last 24 hours as the violence accelerated.
“It is sorrowful that there have been so many deaths, casualties and destruction,” Iraq’s most influential preacher, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said in a letter read out by his representative during a sermon.
“The government and political sides have not answered the demands of the people to fight corruption or achieved anything on the ground,” said Sistani, who stays out of day-to-day politics but whose word is law for Iraq’s Shiites. “Parliament holds the biggest responsibility for what is happening.”
Populist preacher Moqtada al-Sadr, who leads the largest opposition bloc in Parliament, ordered his lawmakers to suspend participation in the legislature until the government introduces a program that would serve all Iraqis.
Many government officials and lawmakers are widely accused of siphoning off public money, unfairly awarding contracts in state institutions and other forms of corruption.
The violence is an unprecedented test for Abdul-Mahdi, a mild-mannered veteran politician who came to power last year as a compromise candidate backed by powerful Shiite groups that have dominated Iraq since the downfall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
In his overnight address, Abdul-Mahdi pledged reforms but said there was no “magic solution” to Iraq’s problems.
He insisted politicians were aware of the suffering of the masses: “We do not live in ivory towers - we walk among you in the streets of Baghdad,” he said.
A young man in a crowd fleeing sniper shots at a central Baghdad square was scornful. “The promises by Abdul-Mahdi are to fool the people, and today they are firing live gunshots at us,” he said.
“Today this was a peaceful protest. They set up these barricades, and the sniper is sitting right there since last night.”
Police and medical sources told Reuters the death toll so far included 18 people killed in the southern city of Nasiriyah, 16 in Baghdad, four in the southern city of Amara and four in Baqouba as unrest spread north of the capital. Deaths were also reported in the southern cities of Hilla and Najaf.
Curfews were imposed in a number of cities. Authorities shut roads into the capital from the north and northeast and were sending reinforcements to Baghdad’s densely populated east. Military convoys were being sent to Nasiriyah.
Late Thursday protesters in Baghdad gathered in darkness by a bonfire set among the flaming wreckage of an armored vehicle, across the Tigris River from the government compound.
“They are shooting live fire at the Iraqi people and the revolutionaries. We can cross the bridge and take them out of the Green Zone!” a man shouted to Reuters TV.
“Abdul-Mahdi, they will cross the bridge. You better resign. Resign.” he shouted as the crowd behind him took up a chant that swept the Middle East during popular uprisings across the region in 2011: “The people demand the fall of the regime!”
Reuters
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