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Iraq's Sadr Threatens to Quit Parliament to Pressure his Opponents

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr delivers a speech in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf on June 3, 2022. (AFP)
Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr delivers a speech in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf on June 3, 2022. (AFP)
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Iraq's Sadr Threatens to Quit Parliament to Pressure his Opponents

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr delivers a speech in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf on June 3, 2022. (AFP)
Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr delivers a speech in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf on June 3, 2022. (AFP)

Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr warned on Thursday that members of his bloc will quit parliament if he is thwarted from forming a national majority government.

He made his remarks days before the deadline he set to his rival Shiite pro-Iran Coordination Framework to reach a solution to the country's political impasse.

In a televised speech, Sadr said he was ready to join the country's opposition if the deadlock were to continue.

The deadlock is "deliberate," he charged, saying his MPs should prepare their resignation letters because the Framework was continuing to impede the government formation efforts.

Sadr's latest warning is the starkest since the eruption of the crisis erupted in wake of the parliamentary elections that saw the influential cleric emerge as the clear winner with 75 MPs. The Framework has challenged the results, dismissing them as a sham.

Sadr has since formed a coalition with Sunni and Kurdish MPs to form a comfortable majority bloc in parliament.

As the Framework demonstrated it was unwilling to help form the government, Sadr announced he would grant them three months to form one and yet, no progress has been made. The deadline ends soon.

"If the Sadrist bloc is seen as an obstacle in the formation of a government, then they are ready to quit," Sadr declared on Thursday.

Parliament went into recess on Thursday and will convene again in July. It seems unlikely that that will be enough time for the deadlock to be resolved.

Observers have expressed alarm at Sadr's latest announcement, with some viewing it as a sign that he has no solution to ending the impasse.

It will also leave his Sunni and Kurdish allies at a loss over what position they will make in wake of his dramatic announcement.

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Red Cross Says Determining Fate of Syria’s Missing ‘Huge Challenge'

People hold portraits of missing relatives during a protest outside the Hijaz train station in the capital Damascus on December 27, 2024, calling for accountability for the perpetrators of crimes in Syria. (AFP)
People hold portraits of missing relatives during a protest outside the Hijaz train station in the capital Damascus on December 27, 2024, calling for accountability for the perpetrators of crimes in Syria. (AFP)
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Red Cross Says Determining Fate of Syria’s Missing ‘Huge Challenge'

People hold portraits of missing relatives during a protest outside the Hijaz train station in the capital Damascus on December 27, 2024, calling for accountability for the perpetrators of crimes in Syria. (AFP)
People hold portraits of missing relatives during a protest outside the Hijaz train station in the capital Damascus on December 27, 2024, calling for accountability for the perpetrators of crimes in Syria. (AFP)

Determining the fate of those who went missing during Syria's civil war will be a massive task likely to take years, the president of the International Committee for the Red Cross said.

"Identifying the missing and informing the families about their fate is going to be a huge challenge," ICRC president Mirjana Spoljaric told AFP in an interview.

The fate of tens of thousands of detainees and missing people remains one of the most harrowing legacies of the conflict that started in 2011 when President Bashar al-Assad's forces brutally repressed anti-government protests.

Many are believed to have been buried in mass graves after being tortured in Syria's jails during a war that has killed more than half a million people.

Thousands have been released since opposition factions ousted Assad last month, but many Syrians are still looking for traces of relatives and friends who went missing.

Spoljaric said the ICRC was working with the caretaker authorities, non-governmental organizations and the Syrian Red Crescent to collect data to give families answers as soon as possible.

But "the task is enormous," she said in the interview late Saturday.

"It will take years to get clarity and to be able to inform everybody concerned. And there will be cases we will never (be able) to identify," she added.

"Until recently, we've been following up on 35,000 cases, and since we established a new hotline in December, we are adding another 8,000 requests," Spoljaric said.

"But that is just potentially a portion of the numbers."

Spoljaric said the ICRC was offering the new authorities to "work with us to build the necessary institution and institutional capacities to manage the available data and to protect and gather what... needs to be collected".

Human Rights Watch last month urged the new Syrian authorities to "secure, collect and safeguard evidence, including from mass grave sites and government records... that will be vital in future criminal trials".

The rights group also called for cooperation with the ICRC, which could "provide critical expertise" to help safeguard the records and clarify the fate of missing people.

Spoljaric said: "We cannot exclude that data is going to be lost. But we need to work quickly to preserve what exists and to store it centrally to be able to follow up on the individual cases."

More than half a century of brutal rule by the Assad family came to a sudden end in early December after a rapid opposition offensive swept across Syria and took the capital Damascus.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, says more than 100,000 people have died in detention from torture or dire health conditions across Syria since 2011.