Word: sadrists
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...holiday until the end of Ramadan (Sept. 19); only two dozen legislators were on hand. But the session, which started at 10 a.m. and lasted past lunch and into the afternoon, was so contentious the deputy speaker asked parliament security to drag journalists out even as MPs of the Sadrist bloc demanded they remain as witnesses for the Iraqi people. (How the recent bombings in Iraq have made America an election issue...
Provincial balloting in southern Iraq on Jan. 31 will probably reveal how much life remains in the Sadrist movement. If candidates tied to the movement fail to make a decent showing in cities such as Basra, Amarah, Najaf and Karbala, the Sadrists' only official political power will be in the Iraqi parliament, where they hold 28 of 275 seats...
...Sadrist parliamentarian Ahmad Hassan Ali al-Masiodi said the movement will retain its stature regardless of the elections. Al-Masiodi pointed to al-Sadr's previous ability to call up mass street protests with a word as a sign of the movement's clout and relevance. "The movement is very strong now, even better than before," says al-Masiodi. "You can notice this when we call for demonstrations in the number of people who come to join." But al-Sadr has not tested his strength with street marches lately. And that power, too, may go the way of his waning...
...member parliament. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most important Shi'ite cleric, has said any deal with the U.S. must be passed by a big majority in order to be truly legitimate in the eyes of the people. That seems unlikely. If the Sunni-Sadrist-secular alliance can break off a few MPs from Maliki's own Shi'ite-Kurdish block, they may even be able to defeat the proposition...
...nine months of painstaking negotiations - was about to unravel, fired broadsides in all directions. At a press conference, he lambasted naysayers as political opportunists who were trying to hold his government for ransom, in effect working against the national interest. His anger was directed not only at the Sunni, Sadrist and secular blocks in parliament, which have formed a loose coalition to oppose the SOFA; he also took an unrelated sideswipe at Kurdish politicians, without whose help he cannot hope to have the agreement ratified...