Iraqi PM says will resign
Iraq's embattled premier announced Friday he would resign in keeping with the wishes of the country's top cleric, as renewed violence added to a soaring death toll in two months of anti-government protests.
Adel Abdel Mahdi's written statement was greeted with cheers and blaring music across Baghdad's iconic Tahrir Square, where demonstrators have massed since early October against a ruling class deemed corrupt and in hock to foreign powers.
"I will submit to the esteemed parliament a formal letter requesting my resignation from the premiership," Abdel Mahdi wrote, hours after Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani used his weekly sermon to urge parliament to replace the cabinet.
Abdel Mahdi would be the first prime minister to step down since Iraq adopted a parliamentary system following the US-led ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "It's our first victory, and we're hoping for many more," shouted one demonstrator in Tahrir as patriotic tunes blasted from motorised rickshaws used to ferry casualties from the square. Nearby, protesters occupying a gutted 18-storey building that has become a symbol of the uprising danced and pumped their fists in the air. Many said the premier's resignation did not go far enough, however. "We won't leave the square until every last one of those corrupt people resigns," said another demonstrator.
"Weed them all out. Every single one."
And despite the joy, security forces dug in behind barricades to keep protesters away from key government buildings, shooting one protester dead, medics said.
The grassroots movement is the largest Iraq has seen in decades and also the deadliest, with more than 420 people killed and 15,000 wounded in Baghdad and the Shia-majority south, according to an AFP tally.
The toll continued to rise Friday, with 15 protesters shot dead in the flashpoint city of Nasiriyah and five killed in clashes in the Shia shrine city of Najaf.
In Salahaddin, a western Sunni province that has not seen protests, authorities declared three days of mourning for Nasiriyah's victims. The UN's top official in Iraq, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said the deaths "cannot be tolerated".