The sit-ins come days after a rocket slammed into Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, landing less than a mile from the sprawling US Embassy. No injuries were reported and no group grabbed credit.
In Baghdad, more than 3,000 people gathered Friday night in central Tahrir Square chanting "no to war" and "yes to peace." In the southern city of Basra, Iraq’s third largest, more than 2,000 men and women gathered for a similar sit-in.
| Remember back in the old days, when Tater could call up a mob of tens of thousands? How the mighty have fallen. |
Moqtada Tateral-Sadr
... the Iranian catspaw holy man who was 22 years old in 2003 and was nearing 40 in 2010. He spends most of his time in Iran, safely out of the line of fire, where he's learning to be an ayatollah...
, who recently said that any political party that would drag Iraq into a US-Iran war "would be the enemy of the Iraqi people."
"The aim of these demonstrations is to distance Iraq from any war," said holy man Ibrahim al-Jabiri, a member of al-Sadr’s movement, as supporters stood by waving Iraqi flags and white roses signaling peace.
There have been concerns recently that Iraq could once again get caught in the middle. The country hosts more than 5,000 US troops, and is home to powerful Iranian-backed militias, some of whom want those US forces to leave.
For the Shiite-majority Iraq to be a theater for proxy wars is not new. It lies on the fault line between Shiite Iran and the mostly Sunni Arab world, led by powerhouse Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
, and has long been the setting in which the Saudi-Iran rivalry for regional supremacy played out.
After America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq to oust dictator Saddam Hussein, American troops and Iranian-backed Lions of Islam fought pitched battles around the country, and scores of US troops were killed or maimed by sophisticated Iranian-made weapons.