In October 2019, young Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad over unemployment, corruption and failing public services. Known in Iraq as Tishreen, “October” in Arabic, the protests centred on the capital’s Tahrir Square and spread across the Shia-majority governorates of the south, becoming the largest protest movement the country had seen since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Security forces and armed groups met the protests with live ammunition and tear gas, often firing directly into crowds, killing at least 541 protesters by mid-2020 according to Iraq’s human rights commission. The crackdown failed to save Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who resigned within two months of the protests’ start.
His interim successor, former intelligence chief Mustafa al-Kadhimi, cast himself as a reformer, promised justice for the protesters killed and held early elections in October 2021 under a new electoral law, in which several protest-born parties won seats.
The gains proved short-lived however, as the Coordination Framework of Shia parties and armed factions formed the next government under Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in 2022, and parliament reversed the electoral reform the following year.
Back in Tahrir Square seven years later
On 25 October 2026, protesters returned to Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to mark the seventh anniversary of the movement. Estimates of the crowd ranged from a few dozen to several thousand, with most local reports putting it in the hundreds, and smaller gatherings took place in Basra, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Hillah. Their demands were largely those of 2019, including action against corrupt officials, a state monopoly on weapons and an end to the sectarian quota system known as muhasasa.
Protesters also highlighted the lack of accountability for the 2019 killings, calling for the prosecution of those responsible, who have largely escaped punishment. Of the more than 2,700 criminal investigations opened into the crackdown, only seven had led to convictions by 2024, according to Iraqi judicial data obtained by Amnesty International, and none of the committees set up by successive governments has published its findings.
The state’s response this year, at least, looked very different from 2019. Police deployed without visible weapons, and a delegation led by Lieutenant General Saad Maan, head of the government’s Security Media Cell, collected the protesters’ demands in the square. The protesters gave the government a month to act, and Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said that evening that the demands had reached him and pledged to review them. Activists nonetheless reported arrests in Baghdad and Dhi Qar in the run-up to the anniversary.
What really had led to Tishreen
Tishreen is often read through the lens of sect, but its core grievance was not sectarian. Its protesters were overwhelmingly young Shias from Baghdad and the south, the same constituency on which Iraq's main Shia parties had built their legitimacy after 2003. Their anger was directed at how those parties governed, and in particular at their handling of public money, jobs, weapons and accountability.
The late Iraqi sociologist Faleh Abdul-Jabar described this as a shift from "identity politics" to "issue politics". Before 2019, he had traced how protests over electricity and water were turning into challenges to muhasasa, the system of party control of public jobs and armed groups operating alongside the state, and to parties' claim to speak for entire communities. The shift did not mean Iraqis were abandoning religious or sectarian identity, but that they were increasingly willing to hold those who claimed to represent it to account.
