The elections have had an official participation of 41 percent, the lowest since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003
The jihadist group Islamic State (IS) reappeared in Iraq on the day set to offer the result of the elections. This time he did not reappear with an attack, but with the arrest of his head of finance, Sami Jasim Muhamad al Jaburi, detained by the Iraqi intelligence services in Turkey. His name shared the limelight in the local media with the publication of the first electoral results of elections with an official participation of 41 percent, the lowest since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, in which Muqtada Al Sadr is outlined again as the winner and his followers celebrated it in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square for the second consecutive night.
The Electoral Commission made the preliminary results public, but regretted not being able to give the final results due to “technical problems.” According to these first data, the movement of the Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr is once again the most voted force and there is a return to the front line of the political landscape of former Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki. The major victims are the political arms of the Shiite militias of the Popular Mobilization Units, which presented themselves under the Al Fateh coalition and lost presence with respect to their results in 2018. In the Sunni countryside, Taqqadum is the most voted option in the provinces where this sect of Islam is the majority in Iraq and Mohamed Al Bousi stands as the great political figure of the moment for Sunnis.
Al Sadr’s soldiers
In Sadr City, the popular neighborhood in eastern Baghdad where the headquarters of the Al Sadr movement is located, there was excitement to repeat victory. “We went out to celebrate the success of the movement on the same Sunday night because we were sure that we were the first force, we did not have to wait for the results,” says Haji Ayad, one of the representatives of the office that the movement has in the center from Sadr City and the only person with a mask for miles around.
The figure of the young Muqtada is omnipresent and shares the limelight with his father, Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Sadeq Al Sadr, and his uncle, Mohamed Baqer Al Sadr, both executed by Saddam Hussein. They form a dynasty revered and respected by the Shiites of Iraq and that is why “our followers vote as soldiers in an army, we are not affected by abstention because we are all soldiers of Al Sadr. Social support for other parties, however, has been questioned, “says this Sadrist official, alluding to the Al Fateh coalition.
The Shiites are divided this time because of Iran. Al Sadr’s movement has a marked nationalist sentiment and demands that Tehran stop its interference. Al Fateh is a coalition with direct connection to Tehran and they consider the Islamic republic an indispensable ally for the security of the country.
The Iranians did not ignore the key moment that the neighboring country is going through and sent the commander of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the Revolutionary Guard, to Baghdad. Ismail Qaani, successor to Qassem Suleimani, killed in a drone attack ordered by Donald Trump in Baghdad in January 2020, landed “by surprise” to “coordinate positions on future post-election alliances,” according to local agency Shafaq. The leap from militias loyal to Tehran to politics has been a failure and people have not voted for them as they expected.
Hit the Islamic State
After the war with the United States, the sectarian conflict and the emergence of the caliphate, Iraq has a security unprecedented in the last 18 years. Prime Minister Mostafa al Kazemi waited for the electoral appointment to pass to report the capture of Sami Jasim Muhamad al Jaburi, IS finance leader and a man very close to the former Caliph Abu Baker Al Bagdadi. “While the heroes of the security forces were focused on the security of the elections, the intelligence services carried out a complex external operation to capture Sami Jasim.”
The US State Department offered a reward of five million dollars (about 4.3 million euros in exchange) for Al Yaburi, whose nom de guerre were ‘Abu Asia’ and ‘Abu Abdulqadir al Zubaidi’. The Government of Ankara did not make any statement after learning of this arrest in its territory.
.