Hundreds of angry protesters hurled stones at provincial council offices in southern Iraq yesterday, wounding five police amid growing rage over power rationing in the summer heat, a police official said.
The police, who included a lieutenant colonel, were all admitted to hospital after the frenzied protest outside the Dhi Qar provincial headquarters in the city of Nasiriyah, the official said.
The provincial council posted pictures of the protest and ensuing clashes on its Web site. The pictures showed serried ranks of riot police with shields deployed outside the concrete and razor-wire perimeter of the headquarters compound. Police and demonstrators alike were armed with sticks.
As the protest turned angry and volley after volley of stones rained down on officers, police resorted to water cannons to disperse the crowd.
The demonstrators, who gathered in response to a call from Shiite clerics, carried banners demanding the dismissal of Electricity Minister Karim Wahid and provincial officials, a correspondent said.
Anger has been growing over rationing that sees Iraqis receive power for just one hour in five.
On Saturday, police opened fire to disperse a similar protest outside provincial council offices in the main southern city of Basra, killing one demonstrator and wounding two, an army commander said.
In an interview with earlier yesterday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the Basra protest could be a harbinger of more trouble as prolonged “bickering” over who should be Iraq’s new next prime minister sparks mounting discontent among ordinary people more concerned by the lack of basic services.
“What we saw in Basra on Saturday was a warning,” Zebari said. “It was the writing on the wall. The anger they showed was extraordinary.”
Zebari said there was a risk that the ambition of politicians, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and former prime minister Iyad Allawi, was overshadowing the public’s demand for nuts-and-bolts services.
“Bickering over the position of the prime minister and who will form the new government... has been one of the key impediments to progress,” he said.
“There isn’t much attention [being given] to the ordinary public, how they feel, how they survive during this summer heat with a lack of electricity … People are tired of a lack of services, lack of action and all this debate on television about government formation and positions. The public sense is one of anger and of tiredness,” he said.
Meanwhile, twin roadside bombs in a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold in the north have killed eight people, six of them policemen, and wounded 18, police said yesterday.
The bombers struck on Sunday evening in the town of Shawkat, 70km south of Mosul, Salaheddin provincial police spokesman Colonel Hatem al-Jubburi said.
“The second bomb was timed to go off several minutes after the first one as people went to the assistance of the casualties,” Jubburi said.
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