BAGHDAD: Iraqi Premier Nouri Al Maliki looked to head off protests in Sunni areas of the country yesterday with a prisoner release even as he threatened to use state resources to “intervene” to end the rallies.
The move came as powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr voiced support for the demonstrations and predicted an impending “Iraqi spring” as ongoing rallies blocked off a key trade route connecting Iraq to Syria and Jordan for a 10th successive day.
Maliki ordered the release of more than 700 female detainees, a key demand of demonstrators, the official appointed to negotiate with protesters, said.
“The prime minister will write to the president to issue a special amnesty to release them,” Khaled Al Mullah said.
Mullah said of 920 female prisoners in Iraqi jails, 210 had been accused or convicted of terrorism-related offences and could not be released. But, he said, they would be transferred to prisons in their home provinces.
The remaining detainees, convicted on lower-level charges, would be released, he said. He did not give a timeframe for the process.
On Monday Maliki warned protesters blocking the highway to Syria and Jordan that his patience was running thin.
The demonstrators should “end their strike before the state intervenes to end it,” he said in an interview with the state broadcaster Iraqiya, in an apparent reference that he could order the use of military force.
Addressing the protesters he said: “I warn you against continuing (blocking the highway), because this is against the Iraqi constitution. “We have been very patient with you.”
The rallies began on December 23, sparked by the arrest of at least nine guards of Finance Minister Rafa Al Essawi, a Sunni Arab and a leading member of the secular Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc which, while part of Maliki’s unity government, frequently criticises him in public.
Meanwhile, campaigners said yesterday that a total of 4,471 civilians died in Iraq’s festering “low-level war” with insurgents in 2012, the first annual climb in the death toll in three years.
The deaths, up from 4,059 in 2011, showed militant fighters were still bent on carrying out large-scale bomb attacks, said rights group Iraq Body Count (IBC) in its annual report.
Tensions between Shia, Kurdish and Sunni factions in Iraq’s power-sharing government have been on the rise this year and the civil war in neighbouring Syria is whipping up sectarian tension across the region. agencies
