Nouri al-Maliki... Prime Minister of Iraq and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party....
joked on Sunday that while Iraq needed to unleash the explosive energy of its people, he did not mean "like a car boom."
Marking the end of an agreement with Washington that allowed U.S. troops to be stationed in the country, Iraq's prime minister said that though the task of rebuilding would be difficult, he believed there was "energy in our people."
"We have to work to explode this energy," Maliki said during a speech at Storied Baghdad
...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
's Al-Rasheed hotel, in the capital's heavily-fortified Green Zone.
"I do not mean, by exploding, to explode it like a car boom," he added, before smiling.
| Maybe Moktada al-Sadr will die from laughter when he hears the joke. |
On December 22, more than a dozen attacks in Storied Baghdad itself killed 60 people in the worst violence to strike the country in more than four months.
U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq on December 18, and on Saturday, a bilateral security pact between the two countries that allowed American troops to be stationed in Iraq expired.