Iraq parliament approves PM resignation
BAGHDAD: Iraq’s parliament approved the resignation of the embattled cabinet yesterday, after two months of violent unrest that have left more than 420 people dead and thousands mourning them in nationwide marches.
Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi said Friday he would submit his resignation to parliament following a spike in the death toll among protesters who accuse the entire ruling elite of being inept, corrupt and beholden to foreign powers.
The demonstrations spread from their epicentre in Baghdad and the mostly Shiite south to the northern, majority-Sunni city of Mosul, where hundreds of students dressed in black organised a mourning march for fallen activists.
Parliament opened its session yesterday and within minutes had approved Abdel Mahdi’s resignation, which according to the constitution renders him and the entire cabinet a ‘caretaker government.’
The speaker of parliament said he would now ask President Barham Saleh to name a new prime minister. Just before the session began, another protester was shot dead in the capital, medical sources said.
The protest movement is Iraq’s biggest since the US-led invasion of 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein and installed a democratic system in the oil-rich but poverty-plagued nation.
The demonstrators have vented their anger at neighbouring Iran, which is seen to wield huge influence in Iraq, with protesters last week burning down an Iranian consulate. “Abdel Mahdi should leave, so should parliament and the parties, and Iran,” said a young demonstrator on Baghdad’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square, the centre of the protest movement that started in early October.
In other developments, an Iraqi court sentenced a police officer to death yesterday after convicting him of killing demonstrators, the first such sentence in two months of deadly civil unrest.
The Kut criminal court sentenced the police major to be hanged and jailed a police lieutenant colonel for seven years for their roles in the deaths of seven protesters in the southern city on Nov 2, judicial sources said.