2019–2021 Iraqi protests

Based on Wikipedia: 2019–2021 Iraqi protests

The Tuk-Tuk Revolution

In October 2019, something remarkable happened on the streets of Baghdad. Young Iraqis, many of them unemployed and with nothing left to lose, commandeered the city's three-wheeled taxis—the humble tuk-tuks that normally ferried passengers through congested traffic—and transformed them into makeshift ambulances. When government snipers opened fire on crowds of protesters, these tuk-tuk drivers would weave through the chaos, dodging bullets to evacuate the wounded. It was such a defining image that some began calling the entire uprising the Tuk-Tuk Revolution.

But this was no romantic rebellion. It was an explosion of accumulated fury.

A Country Rich in Oil, Poor in Everything Else

Iraq produces more oil than the United Arab Emirates. Let that sink in for a moment. The country sits atop one of the world's largest petroleum reserves. Basra, the southern city that became a hotbed of protest, produces about ninety percent of Iraq's oil wealth. By any reasonable calculation, Iraqis should be prosperous.

They are not.

Instead, as protesters gathered in Liberation Square and in cities across the country's central and southern provinces, they faced a grim reality: hospitals falling apart, roads crumbling, electricity cutting out during the brutal summer heat, water so contaminated it made people sick. The oil money? It had vanished into a labyrinth of corruption, siphoned off by a political class that protesters had come to despise.

The demonstrators had a slogan that captured their despair with painful simplicity: "We want a homeland."

The Muhasasa System: How Iraq Got Here

To understand why Iraqis took to the streets, you need to understand a word: muhasasa. It's an Arabic term that roughly translates to "apportionment" or "quota system," and it describes the arrangement that has governed Iraq since the first post-Saddam sovereign government took power in 2006.

Here's how muhasasa works. Government positions are divided up not according to merit or competence, but according to the presumed size of Iraq's ethnic and sectarian communities. Shia Muslims, as the largest group, get the prime minister's office and the most cabinet seats. Sunni Muslims get a share. Kurds get a share. Christians, Turkmen, and other minorities get smaller slices.

In theory, this was supposed to prevent any one group from dominating the others—a reasonable concern in a country where Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime had brutalized the Shia majority and the Kurdish minority for decades. In practice, it created something far worse.

The system incentivized identity-based politics over actual governance. Politicians didn't need to deliver services or fight corruption. They just needed to position themselves as indispensable representatives of their sect or ethnicity. The result was a political class that treated government ministries as personal fiefdoms to be looted. Contracts went to cronies. Jobs went to relatives. The ordinary Iraqi waiting for electricity or clean water could wait forever.

Before October: The Slow Build

The 2019 protests didn't emerge from nowhere. Iraq had been simmering for years.

Back in 2011, when the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, Iraqis staged their own demonstrations demanding an end to corruption and better public services. The government responded with suppression and arrests.

In 2012 and 2013, protests erupted in the country's Sunni-majority provinces. These demonstrations had a different character—driven partly by genuine grievances about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's persecution of Sunni political figures, but also increasingly entangled with insurgent groups. The government launched military operations. The situation deteriorated. By 2014, the Islamic State, better known as ISIS, had swept across a third of Iraq, plunging the country into a brutal war that would last three years.

The war against ISIS consumed everything. But when it ended in 2017, with Iraqi forces declaring victory in Mosul, Iraqis looked around and realized nothing fundamental had changed. The same corrupt politicians held power. The same patronage networks controlled resources. Young people still had no jobs and no prospects.

In July 2018, protests broke out again in Basra over contaminated water and failing electricity. Demonstrators burned government buildings and party headquarters. They even briefly occupied the city's international airport. Security forces killed at least sixteen protesters.

Something was building toward a breaking point.

The Spark

In late September 2019, the Iraqi government made a decision that seemed technical but carried enormous symbolic weight. Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi ordered Lieutenant General Abdel-Wahab Al-Saedi transferred from the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service to a desk job at the Ministry of Defense.

To most outsiders, this would mean nothing. But Al-Saedi was a national hero. He had commanded the forces that liberated Mosul from ISIS. Iraqis had watched him on their television screens, fighting house to house to reclaim their country's second-largest city. He represented something rare in Iraqi politics: competence untainted by sectarian loyalties.

And now he was being shunted aside.

According to sources who spoke to Voice of America, the transfer was pushed by pro-Iranian factions within the Popular Mobilization Forces, the umbrella organization of Shia militias that had fought alongside the regular army against ISIS. These militias had become extraordinarily powerful, and many Iraqis suspected they answered more to Tehran than to Baghdad.

Social media erupted with outrage. When security forces prevented the unveiling of a statue honoring Al-Saedi in Mosul—then removed the statue entirely—the anger intensified. The message seemed clear: anyone who put Iraq first, ahead of factional interests, would be punished.

A few days later, on October 1st, civil activists who had been organizing on social media called for protests. They chose the date. They didn't know they were about to ignite the largest demonstrations Iraq had seen since the American invasion of 2003.

The Streets Explode

The protests began in Baghdad's Liberation Square, the traditional gathering point for Iraqi demonstrations. The initial demands were familiar: jobs, services, an end to corruption. But within hours, the movement had spread to the southern provinces—Basra, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Najaf, Hillah—and the demands had grown more radical.

Protesters wanted the resignation of Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi. They wanted early elections. They wanted a complete overhaul of the political system. And increasingly, they wanted Iran out of their country.

This last demand distinguished these protests from everything that had come before. For years, Iran had steadily expanded its influence in Iraq, backing Shia militias, cultivating politicians, building a parallel power structure that often seemed more effective than the Iraqi state itself. Many Shia Iraqis had initially welcomed this connection—after all, Iran had helped defeat ISIS when the Iraqi army collapsed. But by 2019, the mood had shifted.

In Karbala, one of Shia Islam's holiest cities, protesters tore up pictures of Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader. They burned the Iranian consulate. In Baghdad, crowds chanted against Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds Force, the elite unit responsible for Iranian operations abroad. These were not Sunni sectarians or American proxies. These were Shia Iraqis declaring that being Shia did not mean being Iranian.

The government's response was immediate and brutal.

Bullets and Tear Gas

On the first day of protests, authorities imposed an internet blackout, cutting off seventy-five percent of the country's access. They declared curfews. They deployed security forces backed by Iranian-aligned militias.

And they started shooting.

Within three days, according to Amnesty International, at least eighteen civilians and one police officer were dead. Hundreds were injured. But instead of dispersing, the protests grew.

The government deployed snipers. They positioned marksmen on rooftops overlooking crowds and shot into the masses below. They used hot water cannons. They used tear gas—not just ordinary tear gas, but military-grade canisters that, when fired directly at protesters' heads and chests at close range, became lethal projectiles. They drove patrol vehicles directly into crowds.

At night, the protests took on a different character. While daytime demonstrations drew Iraqis from all walks of life—professionals, students, families—the evening hours brought young men from the poorest suburbs, armed with molotov cocktails and burning tires, seeking confrontation with the security forces that had killed their friends.

A brief pause came in early October when millions of Shia pilgrims began arriving for Arba'een, a major religious commemoration. But on October 24th, the protests roared back with greater intensity.

The Death Toll Rises

The numbers are difficult to verify, but they are staggering.

In late October alone, at least fifty protesters were killed attempting to enter Baghdad's Green Zone—the fortified government district that has symbolized the disconnect between Iraq's rulers and its people ever since American forces established it after the 2003 invasion.

In Karbala, security forces killed somewhere between fourteen and thirty protesters in a single night. Government officials initially denied any deaths had occurred.

In Hillah, members of the Badr Organization—one of the most powerful Iranian-backed militias—opened fire on protesters assembled in front of their office. Seven died.

In the provincial city of Maysan, the situation descended into something approaching civil war. Protesters clashed with members of the Peace Companies, a militia loyal to the influential cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as well as with Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq and the Badr Organization. Angry crowds pulled two militia commanders from an ambulance and beat them to death in the street.

Qais Khazali, the leader of Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, announced that nine of his fighters had been killed. He blamed Israel—a reflexive accusation that many protesters found absurd—and vowed revenge "four times over."

The Assassinations Begin

As the protests continued into November and December, a darker pattern emerged. Activists began dying not in street clashes, but in targeted killings.

By late December, at least twenty-nine activists connected to the protest movement had been assassinated. Most were killed in Baghdad, often by gunmen on motorcycles who would approach, open fire, and disappear into traffic. The victims included organizers, medics who had treated wounded protesters, and anyone who had become too visible on social media.

In January 2020, Ahmad Abdelsamad, a journalist for Dijlah TV who had been covering the protests, was shot dead in his car along with his cameraman, Safaa Ghali. The gunmen were never identified.

A few days later, Janat Madhi, a forty-nine-year-old female activist, was murdered as she returned home from protests in Basra.

In August, Tahseen Osama Al-Shahmani was shot twenty times at his internet service company in Basra. A few days after that, Reham Yacoub, another female activist, was killed when gunmen opened fire on her car, wounding three others.

None of the killers were caught. None were prosecuted. The message was unmistakable.

The Embassy Attack and Its Consequences

On the last day of 2019, events took a dramatic turn that would reshape the entire region.

Groups affiliated with the Popular Mobilization Forces stormed the American Embassy in Baghdad. Unlike the Iraqi protesters who had been blocked with bullets when they tried to approach the Green Zone, these militia members walked right through security checkpoints. Their leaders—Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Qais al-Khazali, Hadi al-Amari, and Falih Al-Fayyadh—were photographed at the scene.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was no stranger to attacks on American embassies. Decades earlier, he had directed the December 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait, for which he was convicted and imprisoned.

President Donald Trump accused Iran of "orchestrating" the attack and promised they would be "held fully responsible."

Three days later, on January 3rd, 2020, a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport killed both Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The assassination of Soleimani—the architect of Iran's regional strategy, a man who had operated in the shadows for decades while shaping events from Lebanon to Yemen—was a geopolitical earthquake. Iran launched missile strikes against American bases in Iraq. For a few terrifying days, the region seemed on the brink of a major war.

On January 5th, Iraq's parliament voted to expel American troops from the country. The resolution was non-binding and complicated by the absence of Kurdish and Sunni lawmakers who had boycotted the session, but it signaled how dramatically the dynamic had shifted.

The Iraqi protesters who had chanted against both American and Iranian interference found themselves caught in the middle of an escalating confrontation between the two powers. Their movement continued, but the world's attention had moved on.

What the Protesters Wanted

It's easy to lose sight of the protesters' actual demands amid the violence and geopolitics. So let's be clear about what they were asking for.

They wanted jobs. Iraq has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the Middle East, and the oil economy creates relatively few positions for the millions of young people entering the workforce each year.

They wanted working infrastructure. Electricity that didn't cut out in summer when temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Water that didn't make them sick. Roads that weren't cratered. Hospitals that had supplies and staff.

They wanted an end to the muhasasa system. They wanted politicians chosen for competence, not sectarian identity. They wanted a government that served citizens rather than looting them.

They wanted sovereignty. Not domination by Iran. Not occupation by America. A country that belonged to Iraqis.

These demands were neither radical nor unreasonable. They were the basic expectations that citizens of functioning states take for granted. The ferocity of the government's response revealed just how threatening these modest requests were to those in power.

A Changed Country

The protests eventually subsided, ground down by the pandemic that swept the world in early 2020, by the relentless violence, by sheer exhaustion. Abdul-Mahdi resigned in November 2019, but his successor, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, struggled to implement meaningful reforms against entrenched interests.

Yet something had changed. The generation that took to the streets—young, educated, connected through social media, disillusioned with the sectarian politics their parents had accepted—had announced themselves as a force. They had faced snipers and survived. They had buried their friends and kept marching. They had declared, in front of the entire world, that being Iraqi meant more than being Shia or Sunni, more than being pro-American or pro-Iranian.

The Tuk-Tuk Revolution may not have achieved its immediate goals. The muhasasa system endures. Corruption remains endemic. Iranian influence persists. But those weeks in late 2019, when ordinary Iraqis transformed three-wheeled taxis into ambulances and faced down bullets with nothing but their bodies and their anger, revealed something important.

They revealed a country that, despite everything—despite invasion and occupation, despite civil war and terrorism, despite exploitation by foreign powers and betrayal by its own leaders—still contained people willing to fight for something better. Who still believed, against all evidence, that they deserved a homeland.

That belief, once expressed so publicly and at such cost, cannot be easily extinguished.