With border guards, cleanup crews and hospitals, Iraqi protesters have created a mini-state in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, offering the kinds of services they say their government has failed to provide.
“We’ve done more in two months than the state has done in 16 years,” said Haydar Chaker, a construction worker from Babylon Province, south of the capital.
Everyone has their role, from cooking bread to painting murals, with a division of labor and scheduled shifts.
Chaker traveled to Baghdad with his friends after the annual Arbaeen pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbalah. His pilgrim’s tent and cooking equipment were also useful at a protest encampment.
Installed in the iconic square whose name means “liberation,” he provides three meals a day to hundreds of protesters, cooking with donated food.
The self-reliant encampment is the heart of a protest movement that seeks the radical overhaul of Iraq’s political system, and despite frequent power cuts, it never stops beating.
At the entrances to the square, dozens of guards like Abou al-Hassan oversee makeshift barricades, where men and women search incoming visitors.
“We Iraqis rub shoulders with the military from a young age, so we pick up a thing or two,” said al-Hassan, dressed in camouflage fatigues. “We don’t need special training to detect saboteurs and keep them out ... or to be able to defend our state.”
However on Friday last week, their “state” came under attack, when gunmen Iraqi authorities have failed to identify stormed a parking building occupied by protesters.
After the massacre that left 24 dead, protesters installed new checkpoints and closed an 18-story building overlooking the square. Infiltrated by intelligence agents, and at the mercy of gunmen able to cross police and military roadblocks at will, protesters insist their mini-state remains committed to non-violence.
Yet in a country where the influence and arsenals of pro-Iran armed groups continue to increase, the protest enclave has forged an alliance with another of Iraq’s states within a state.
Unarmed “blue helmets” from Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Saraya al-Salam (Peace Brigades) have intervened to protect protesters.
In front of the field clinics, as tuk-tuks zoom between clusters of protesters, dozens of volunteers sweep the pavement. Tahrir has never been so clean, protesters say, in contrast to its previous neglect by municipal workers.
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