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Ghurfan al-Sa'idi, member of Parliament with the Sadrist bloc, said Thursday that “the Sadrist bloc has adopted a group of demands that it believes will calm the Iraqi street after the bombing of the tomb of the two 'Askari imams,” indicating that “the withdrawal of the bloc from the parliament will continue until the government implements the bloc’s demands.”
She clarified that the bloc’s demands of the Iraqi government center on the importance of “ridding the city of Samarra of any presence of the American forces,” in addition to opening a “wide-ranging investigation with the security forces that oversee the responsibility of protecting the Samarra shrines,” to discover “how the militants arrived in the shrine of the two imams,” Aswat al-Iraq reports.
“We have also demanded that the Iraqi government assume its responsibilities in protecting the shrines (of Samarra), and restricting the security protection to Iraqi forces alone, in addition to the securing of the road that leads to Samarra and the immediate rebuilding of the shrine, to be a response to what happened and an affirmation of the existence of an Iraqi government capable of advancing its role and standing by its people,” the MP continued.
The MP said that if the Sadr bloc’s demands were not met by the government, “the Sadrists will take other positions, to be announced at that time.”
“We presented our deadline to the government, and after its expiration we will have something else to say,” without specifying the time period that the Sadr current has laid out for the Iraqi government, nor the nature of the other steps that the Sadrists would take.
The Sadrist bloc announced the suspension of its participation in the parliament on Wednesday in protest of the bombing attack at the shrine in Samarra, which houses the tombs of two Shi'a imams.
Wednesday morning, the two minarets of the structure were destroyed in a bomb attack.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shi'a cleric who came to leadership of the Sadrist current following the death of his father, released a statement yesterday, condemning the bombings and blaming the US authorities for seeking to sow sectarian discord in Iraq.
