Al-Sadr postpones demonstrations of his supporters… and “al Sadr’s minister” says coordination framework is playing with fire

The leader of the Sadrist movement in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, announced, on Tuesday, the postponement of their demonstration, which was scheduled for next Saturday, “until further notice.” This announcement came at a time when the political crisis escalated during the past two weeks due to the open sit-in of Sadr’s supporters, which began inside the parliament and then moved to the Green Zone in central Baghdad. Meanwhile, supporters of the coordination framework, the main opponent of al-Sadr, began a sit-in last Friday outside the Green Zone, to demand the “formation of a national service government.”

Saleh Muhammad al-Iraqi, known as “Minister of al-Sadr,” attacked some parties to the coordination framework, amid growing fears of armed clashes between supporters of the two Shiite poles in light of the exacerbation of the political crisis in Iraq. Al-Sadr’s minister called on the blocs affiliated with the framework, in reference to the “State of Law coalition”, “Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq” and the “National Wisdom Movement”, to stop what he described as the “Trinity Framework”, saying that the framework is playing with fire and leading to political disagreements and a civil war, which serves their interest, he said. The minister indicated that the decision of the coordination framework to mobilize demonstrators against the Sadrist demonstrators aims to stir up sedition, stressing that the Sadrist movement’s demonstrations came to confront the corrupt.