On the morning of 1 October 2019, social media began to spread the slogan “I’m going out to take my rights”, which soon became the trigger for people to take to the streets of Baghdad.
The general outrage was provoked by a political stalemate in the country in addition to two recent events: the violent repression by the security forces against the higher degree unemployed people who were protesting before the Education, Health and Electricity ministries in Baghdad; and the unjustified demotion, on the 28th of September, of the highly respected commander of the Counter-Terrorism Service, Lieutenant General ‘Abd al-Wahab al-Sa‘di.
Only a few thousand people, mainly youth, responded to the call. They gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir square and moved towards the riot police block on the Jumhuriyya bridge. This happening, initially relatively modest, turned rather quickly into a quasi-uprising. According to Ahmad Al-Sheikh Majed, an engaged journalist, and part of the al-tayar al-madani (the civic or civil current) at the time, the security forces reacted disproportionately and confronted the young protesters up to Sadr City, a peripheral area, east of the city centre.
This was enough for people to descend en masse, in Baghdad as well as in the main provincial cities of the South.
“All the people I knew that would usually never descend to the streets, did it at that moment. There was the idea in those days that those who did not go to the square, were not ‘real men’” says Mushreq al-Firiji, one of the leaders of the movement.
“We came out of the highway from our neighborhood (al-Jihad) with a group of young people. We first blocked the highway leading to the airport, then occupied it,” Othman, a young activist, recalls. At the same time, other activists tried to break on the security cordon that riot police provided around the Green Zone, the area which hosts the government and parliament (located beyond the Tigris river’s left bank al-Karkh), leaving victims at each attempt.
The protests then stopped in respect of the religious festivity of Ashura, and the Arbaeen pilgrimage to Karbala only to resume on 25 October.
In the following days, it became better organised, and the activists could gain a space of permanent mobilization in a two kilometers long area between Tahrir square and the Rashid Street crossway. “When security forces blocked the Jumhuriyya bridge, protesters set up barricades on Ahrar, Sinak and Shuhada bridges” , separating them from the Green Zone.
After failing to break through the bridges, a group of demonstrators took position in the so-called ‘Turkish restaurant’ as a revolutionary vanguard and to keep the level of confrontation with the police high. According to Othman and Salih, two young men who took part in the events, a “specialized” group of youth was dedicated to clashing with the police on the Jumhuriyya bridge.
In parallel, an extension of tents appeared throughout, starting a long-standing sit-in that lasted until March 2020, with Tahrir square as its symbolic and geographic center. Here, a new type of activist was born and a new way of social relations was formed. Those ‘new’ Iraqis became known as Tishreenis – from Tishreen, October in Mashriqi Arabic- and their slogan was “we want a homeland”, meaning a new pact of citizenship away from sectarianism, corruption, and militias.
In this ‘free space’, the revolutionary situation was characterized by a unity between demonstrators of all tendencies and the rest of society. Safaa al-Tayar, another activist on the streets in those days, points out the attitude of parents towards their mobilized children: “they were afraid about their kids, but still encouraged them. They were bringing food and other living necessities”.
Private traders or even expatriates collected financial support for the demonstrators, as some of them remained on the street day and night. The activists “felt empowered by the people’s support and felt they could give a change to the events”, recalls Ali Muri, who was there in those days..
Organization and leadership
As the events unfolded, however, this unity was broken, and the movement began to lose strength. In part this was due to the split between the Tishreenis and the popular Sadrist Islamist movement around the issue of the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani and Mahdi al-Muhandis, respectively the leaders of the Iranian revolutionary guard and of the pro-Iranian Shi‘a militias al-Hashd al-Sha‘bi (Popular Mobilization Forces), in early January 2020.
Another reason was the movement’s lack of a political strategic vision. The movement had neither leadership nor a structured organization, and lacked a clear-cut counter-hegemonic political vision.
After the Tishreenis’ refusal to participate in the anti-American demonstration organized by the Sadrists following the US attack, the latter retired their activists from the square, leaving the former exposed to militia violence and to speculations about their alleged western support.
The split between the revolutionary youth and the Sadrists in January 2020 was dramatic because the movement lost an important part of the mobilized public. The revolutionary momentum was lost, and the Tishreenis were unable to influence the political process, notwithstanding the other parties’ demand for their support in appointing a new Prime Minister. Official political parties approached many Tishreenis in order to gain their support or even coopt them.
It must be said that if a recognized leadership, as the prominent Iranian scholar Asef Bayat argued, did not exist, there were however important figures who took the role of leaders and pushed for an organized structure. According to al-Tayar, the movement’s leadership consisted of a small group of leaders, around 10 or 20 people. Ahmad Majid, one of those, emphasized however the young activists’ radical refusal of any form of organization, “accepting at the very best a coordination among the tents, in order to discuss current events and actions to be conducted,” he explains. Lack of organisation and the loss of the revolutionary momentum led the movement to lose the chance to drive the political process.
On 5 May 2020, the Parliament voted in favour of an interim government headed by Mustafa al-Kadhimi, facilitating early elections. This executive was indeed not a Tishreeni one, but it was accepted by the square as the “lesser evil”, according to Ali al-Miyah, one of the animators of Tuk tuk, the magazine that became the voice of the square
Political failure
The formation of the government brought the revolutionary process into the nextstage, with the formation of a few Tishreeni political parties in view of the 2021 general elections. Of those, al-Bayt al-Watani (BAW, The National House) refused to run in the elections, while Emtidad (“Extension”) did.
This process became the most difficult test for the Tishreenis, ultimately ending with their failure. Activists accused party leaders in particular of having an undemocratic attitude in the process of decision making and of being too ‘adaptable’ to the sectarian political consociational praxis in the country.
According to Laith, one of the founders of BAW, the decision not to participate in the elections in particular was taken without real consultation with the members. This led to militants denouncing the lack of transparency in the decision-making process and a loss of credibility in the whole movement. As Youssef, an activist opposed to the electoral participation, argued, the political parties’ experience ended up in a “war of chieftains (zuama)”, and they failed in managing internal disputes.
If BAW failed without being tested in the elections, Emtidad represented an opposite example. The party decided to go to the ballots, winning 9 MPs and forming a Tishreeni parliamentary group. Emtidad supported Mohamad al-Halbusi, the president of the chamber, in order to facilitate the Sadrists’ strategy of forming a majority government, instead of the consociational usual one.
Outside the party, most Tishreenis however disliked the move, looking at any deal with traditional parties as betrayal. This experience of political participation marked by infighting, competition for leadership, and infiltration by saboteurs ended up with both Tishreeni parties losing members and ultimately becoming empty shells. . Today, Emtidad only has 4 MPs while BAW “is no more than a logo that exists only by virtue of its secretary general Hussein al-Ghorabi’s public presence”, as Ali al-Miyah laments.
Ideology and political vision
Tishreen as a revolutionary movement did not survive the 2021 parliamentary elections. Besides organizational and leadership issues, there was also the lack of a clear counter hegemonic political vision. The militants of the surviving Tishreeni political parties that had decided not to participate in the election – Al Bayt al-Iraqi (BAI) and the Nazil Akhod Haqqi (“I’m going out to take my rights”) – give a glance at a possible retrospective critical evaluation.
The two parties’ presidents, Muhi al-Ansari and Mushreq al-Firiji, respectively, who had been important leaders of the larger revolutionary movement, both argue that the Tishreen movement failed for lack of political experience, stressing the necessity of change in the long term. Al-Ansari argued about the lack of a structured and consistent political vision. In particular, both BAW and Emtidad were not able to be inclusive towards a public larger than their Shi‘a regional constituency (both parties were rooted in the Shi‘a populated governorates).
Ideologically, the Tishreeni activists were less politically counter-hegemonic, both in terms of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism and for their adoption of a liberal discourse, as they were against the social and cultural norms of their society. Many Tishreenis interviewed declared themselves non religious, making their stance against religion an important part of their discourse. Politically, they emphasised concepts such as “rule of law”, “justice”, and “individual liberties”. However, they tended to consider issues such as anti-imperialism or the Palestinian cause less relevant than the Iranian inference in the country.
While they were able to create consensus in the first stage of the revolutionary movement, when the larger part of the Iraqi public supported them against the corrupt political elites, they became isolated as they appeared to bring a discourse too distant from society, as Safa Rashid, a journalist and political analyst from the online magazine Al-Alam Al-Jadid, explains.
In this context, one decision that had important strategic implications was the split with the Sadrists. The latter had formed Sa’iroun (“Marching Forward”) an electoral alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) in the 2018 parliamentary election in an attempt to form a majority government beyond the sectarian political praxis for the first time in post-2003 Iraq.
The ICP’s idea was to take advantage of the Sadrists’ popular base to gain ‘religious acceptance’ among the popular sectors of society while the Sadrists sought democratic and anti-sectarian credentials. The Tishreenis did not accept this frame since the Sadrists, in their view, did not actually have those credentials. Especially, since the Sadrists were considered as “part of the system”, as Zahra and Sahar, two young Tishreenis, critically argue.
Ali, a former Sadrist turned Tishreeni, stresses, “For many the memory of Jaysh al-Mahdi (the former Sadrist military wing) committing sectarian violence in the late 2000s was still alive.” This is added to Sadrist ‘Blue Hats’ dramatic clashes with the Tishreenis in February 2020 in Najaf, after the latter’s refusal to endorse Mohammad Allawi as new Prime Minister.
“A revolutionary movement that failed but left a mark”
The events of 2019-2021 were a revolutionary movement. Although they did not deliver a revolutionary outcome in terms of regime change, they introduced a new practice of contestation in Iraqi political life that will remain as a precedent for future developments.
For many Iraqis, there is a pre and a post Tishreen, especially in terms of political culture, language and imagination. The ethno-confessional political system, albeit in crisis, is still in place in Iraq and the Tishreenis are today rather isolated. They failed to create a political organization, a matter to be taken into serious account for any future movement to be more effective, as well as to translate their request for overcoming religion and confessional politics into a new coherent political vision.
The Tishreeni movement has however brought back to the political mainstream the theme of inclusion and citizenship beyond sectarianism and violence. This is today part of the Iraqi people’s awareness as it is the preoccupation of all political actors to take the stances of the movement in their program.
This article is part of the Italian Ministry of Research (PRIN2022) project “’We want bread, not bullets’: Iraqi food politics in historical perspective”, funded by the EU, CUP H53D23000190001.
