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...
on Saturday called on supporters to stage a sit-in outside Baghdad’s Green Zone -- an apparent reversal of earlier pledges to keep his followers away from the international zone.
"Every Iraqi who is loyal to the country must rise up and begin a new phase of peaceful protest... by holding a sit-in in front of the gates of the Green Zone until the end of the prescribed period, by which I mean the 45 days," al-Sadr declared in a statement.
On Feb. 12, al-Sadr gave the government of Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi 45 days to draw up a non-sectarian-based government of technocrats mandated with uprooting official corruption and streamlining state bureaucracy.
Last week, he warned that his followers would storm Baghdad’s Green Zone -- which houses government institutions and foreign embassies -- if the deadline passed without the demands being met.
On Friday, tens of thousands of al-Sadr's followers demonstrated in Baghdad and Iraq’s southern provinces -- for the third week in a row -- to reiterate their demands.
Abdul Aziz al-Zalmi, a member of Iraq’s Al-Ahrar bloc, a Sadrist Shia political coalition, attributed al-Sadr's calls for a sit-in outside the Green Zone to "the lack of seriousness on the part of the government in carrying out the promised reforms".
"Now," al-Zalmi told Anadolu Agency, "the government must confront the street, which demands a new government of non-partisan technocrats."
Last summer, Iraq’s parliament approved a comprehensive raft of reforms proposed by al-Abadi. The reforms are intended to meet longstanding popular demands to eliminate government corruption and streamline state bureaucracy.
Al-Sadr's bloc in parliament holds 34 seats in the 328-seat assembly and three ministerial portfolios in Iraq’s current government.