BAGHDAD - Government security forces demolished dozens of unregistered businesses in Baghdad’s Sadr City in the early hours of Monday morning in an effort to remove illegal buildings, leading to heavy clashes with business owners.
Shop owners told Rudaw on Monday that around 150 small businesses were destroyed in the district of northeastern Baghdad, stressing that they were not informed of the operation advance, nor offered compensation for damages.
Umm Ali’s vegetable store was burned and destroyed in the operation, alongside many other market stalls in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the stronghold of influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
In an attempt to express her anger at the action that has stripped many of their livelihoods, Ali praised former dictator Saddam Hussein, with others around her chanting, “I sacrifice my soul and blood for you, Saddam.”
Another vendor, Hayder Mousa, told Rudaw that “the municipality team and the driver of the front-end loader were drunk... he was singing and wearing headphones while demolishing the shops.”
“Is this how Sadr City should be built? By destroying the electricity poles? Look, the shops were set on fire and it will cost seven million [dinars] to rebuild them,” he said.
Illegal construction is an issue across Iraq, where nearly a quarter of the country live in poverty. According to Iraq’s planning ministry, over 3.5 million people live in illegal homes.
In August, the mayor of Karbala, a city southwest of Baghdad, was killed while supervising a campaign to end land abuse. He was shot in the chest by a man whose illegally-built home was being torn down. The accused was sentenced to death.
A few weeks later, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi ordered the continuation of the campaign to destroy illegal buildings, calling the illegal use of public property a “violation of the public right”.
In a report on Sadr City and popular protest published in September, Huma Gupta advised that, “Instead of suppressing protesters or co-opting their material demands, the Iraqi government could choose to redistribute power and wealth to its disenfranchised citizens, whose lives and labor built the state of Iraq.”
Video editing by Sarkawt Mohammed
