Iraq’s most influential Shi’ite cleric urged political leaders on Friday to refrain from clinging to their posts – an apparent reference to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has defied demands that he step aside.
Speaking through an aide who delivered a sermon after Friday prayers in the holy city of Kerbala, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said leaders should show flexibility so that political deadlocks could be broken and Iraq could confront a powerful insurgency that is tearing the very nation apart.
Maliki has come under mounting pressure since Sunni militants led by the the sadistic terrorist “Islamic State” swept across northern Iraq last month and seized vast swathes of territory, posing the biggest challenge to Maliki’s Shi’ite-led government since U.S. forces withdrew in 2011.
Critics say Maliki is a divisive figure whose alienation of Sunnis has fuelled sectarian hatred and played into the hands of the insurgents, who have reached to within 70 km (45 miles) of the capital Baghdad.
Sistani said it is time for politicians to think of Iraq’s interests, not their own.
“The sensitivity of this phase necessitates that all the parties concerned should have a spirit of national responsibility that requires the practice of the principle of sacrifice and self-denial and not to cling to positions and posts.”
Maliki, a Shi’ite, has ruled since an election in April in a caretaker capacity, dismissing demands from the Sunnis and Kurds that he step aside for a less polarising figure. Even some Shi’ites oppose his bid for a third term.
Despite pressure from the United States, the United Nations, Iran and Iraq’s own Shi’ite clergy, politicians have been unable to quickly come up with an inclusive government to hold the fragmenting country together.
Iraq’s parliament took a step toward forming a new government on Thursday, when lawmakers elected senior Kurdish lawmaker Fouad Masoum as president.
The next step, choosing a prime minister, may prove far more difficult as Maliki has shown no sign he will give up his post.
Sistani’s call for flexibility could hasten his departure. He is seen as a voice of reason and sanity in the deeply divided country, and has almost mythological stature to millions of followers, mainly members of Iraq’s Shi’ite majority.
The 83-year-old cleric who hardly ever appears in public last month seized his most active role in politics in decades by calling on Iraqis to take up arms against the Sunni insurgency. Such is the terror inspired by the IS that its around 3000 fighters toting only small arms routed the million strong Iraqi army that was one of the best trained and equipped in the region.
