Baghdad - (AFP) - Employees, housewives, daily workers or activists: These are the people who have been sitting inside the Iraqi parliament for days, raising the same demands, but they come from different backgrounds.

Everyone repeats the same rhetoric, rhetoric similar to that of Muqtada al-Sadr , and it is accompanied by social demands that reflect the harshness of daily life for the working class in Iraq: from changing the political system and fighting corruption to finding work for the youth and securing good public services.

Behind this unified language, different stories.

Ali Muhammad, 43, left his wife and three children at home in southern Iraq, and came to participate in the sit-in since Saturday.

And the man says in eloquent language that expresses his profession as an Islamic education teacher, "(I came) for the sake of my country's devotion from the wickedness of the corrupt."
The teacher is also calling for a new constitution and presidential system. He does not hide his participation since 2003 in all the demonstrations called for by the Sadrist movement.

He repeats the phrase "We are the Sadrists" more than once, and tells how he participated four times in storming the fortified Green Zone in the capital, which includes government headquarters and embassies. He entered parliament in 2016 and the prime minister's office, and re-entered it twice during the past week.

He adds, "I entered it all, and yes, I am proud," speaking of the "ideological revolutionary trend" of the current to which he belongs.

The man acknowledges the existence of "challenges and difficulty in the struggle for reform," but the "divine protection" that al-Sadr enjoys facilitates the task, in addition to his "dedicated fan base, which is the arm with which it strikes the dens of the corrupt."

Umm Ali sits on a sofa inside the parliament building. The 47-year-old has been coming to parliament every day since Saturday with her husband, siblings and children.

The woman, a housewife in the long black abaya and the grandmother of 13 grandchildren, assures that she will come "every day, until the master tells us to withdraw."

Umm Ali placed a picture of Muqtada al-Sadr on her knees while saying, "He is the only honest one, the only one who fights against injustice."

In a country rich in oil but suffering from corruption, Umm Ali participates in the demonstrations to "take back the homeland. The homeland has been lost, the entire homeland has been plundered."

Umm Ali is a resident of the popular neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad, which was named after Muqtada's father. Her husband is with special needs, following an injury he received in 2009 in an explosion in Baghdad. "He was an employee, and he was out of the workplace," she says. She adds that he had to drop out of primary school to support his family, "Since then, we have not received any compensation."

The woman, a mother of six girls and a boy, denounces that "there is no work for the youth. Even graduates with higher degrees work as porters or as daily wage laborers. Is this what they deserve?"

Rasool Ashour, 20, was among the demonstrators who entered Parliament. In his tuk-tuk that he brought from Sadr City, and for 500 dinars per person (about 30 cents on the dollar), Rasul now takes the demonstrators along the long road that leads to Parliament, saving them the trouble of walking under a scorching sun and a temperature of about fifty degrees Celsius.

"It is a symbolic tariff," the young man says. "Only the price of fuel is enough for me."

Working in the Sadr City neighborhood gives him an income of just over ten dollars, barely sufficient to secure the sustenance of his wife and one-year-old daughter.

Like Rasool, dozens of tuk-tuk drivers came to and around the Green Zone to take protesters to parliament.

"All these young men do not have a job... We want a job. Let them give me a job, whatever it is, even if it is guarding the border with Syria," he says.

The young man also denounces the poor condition of the roads in his neighborhood, the daily power outages, and the absence of public services.

And his last demand to the authorities: to lift the ban on roaming the tuk-tuk between six in the evening and six in the morning.

Unlike other protesters, Mustafa, a 29-year-old computer engineer who takes French lessons in his spare time, says he does not belong to the Sadrist movement.

Like a few demonstrators in the Iraqi parliament, his first allegiance is to the broad anti-authority protest movement that rocked Iraq in the fall of 2019.

The young man recalls that the Sadrists at the time joined the protests at one point.
"Half of the demonstrators were supporters of al-Sadr. They had their own tents and raised his pictures," he says.
He comes daily to the parliament sit-in to "change the reality" of Iraq.
He says about politicians, "They have millions and billions, they have air conditioners, houses, and palaces abroad, and we have nothing at all."
When asked about al-Sadr's call to change the political system, he laughed and said, "But he changed it! Where is the government? It fell."