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...
urged Iraqis on Monday to unite rather than squabble over a possible rerun of the election his bloc won last month, a message apparently meant to defuse political tension after a ballot box storage depot caught fire.
Certain parties are trying to drag Iraq into civil war, Sadr said, adding that he would not participate in one.
Parliament has mandated a manual recount of the election in which a number of parties alleged fraud. A storage site holding half of Baghdad’s ballot boxes went up in flames on Sunday in what Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi denounced as a "plot to harm the nation and its democracy".
An Iraqi court ordered the arrest of four people accused of setting fire to the storage site, state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
reported. Three of them were coppers and one an employee of the Independent High Elections Commission.
Iraqi authorities said the ballot boxes were saved but the fire has added to fears of violence.
"What Moqtada said about (Iraq) being close to some sort of armed conflict is concerning. The situation is tense and it seems to be on the brink of conflict," said Renad Mansour, research fellow at Chatham House in London.
Sadr, a Shi’ite holy man who once led violent campaigns against the U.S. occupation that ended in 2011, has emerged as a nationalist opponent of powerful Shi’ite Moslem parties allied with neighboring Iran.
"Stop fighting for seats, posts, gains, influence, power, and rulership," he wrote in an article published by his office.
"Is it not time to stand as one for building and reconstruction, instead of burning ballot boxes or repeating elections just for one seat or two?"
Sadr has in the past mobilized tens of thousands of followers to protest government policies he opposed.
The election, which was the first since the defeat of Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
turbans who seized a third of Iraq in 2014, raised hopes that Iraqis could put aside sectarian divisions to rebuild.
One of Sadr’s top aides said on Sunday the fire was intended either to force a rerun of the election or to conceal fraud.