“Get out, get out, occupier!” was the slogan of the day in Baghdad, where a protest march called by Moqtada al-Sadr drew tens of thousands of demonstrators calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
The status of US troops has been controversial for awhile in Iraq, but became dramatically more so after the US attack on Baghdad International Airport earlier this month, which killed a top Iranian general as well as members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).
Concern is high that, left to their own devices, the US would end up not only starting a war with Iran, but would use Iraq as the battleground for that war. This led Iraq’s parliament to vote 170-0 to instruct the government to order US and all foreign troops out of the country.
But that hasn’t happened. The vote was almost immediately followed by President Trump threatening massive sanctions, and even to seize Iraq’s oil trade bank account, the source of 90% of the government’s revenue. Since then, Iraq’s PM Adel Abdul Mahdi has backed away from talk of the US leaving, saying that’ll be a matter for the next government to contend with.
Protesters don’t seem comfortable waiting, with one holding a placard warning that the US needs to bring its troops home or “prepare their coffins.” Others added that with the US not leaving after the parliament vote, it is to be viewed as an occupying force.
It would be difficult to contest the portrayal of the US as an occupier at this point, as the administration has made very clear that US troops have no intention of leaving Iraq, even if asked by the Iraqis.
If those aerial pictures are any indication — hundreds of thousands more likely. What is the point in underestimating. Pictures are indeed worth more then thousands of words.
It`s obvious why the US and the corporate controlled MSM does not want the world to know that there was a march where millions of Iraqis showed up to the demand of the US and its proxy to leave Iraq.
Around two million by estimations of crowd density. Likely more.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-news-media-hide-truths-u-s-public-supports-invasions/5701738
The question that comes to mind is the agreement US has with Iraq. It was clearly violated as bombing Iraqi militia, or an official from another country in Iraq — is explicitly prohibited. These attacks have nothing to do with ISIS — and the agreement is violated if US used Iraqi soil for taking hostile measures against Iran. Even if what US is claiming to be true — that Iranians are present in whatever capacity, this is irrelevant. First, because they are there legally, and second, US is not in war with Iran.
On all grounds US is in violation of agreement, and can be asked to leave without the period specified in an agreed upon departure. Iraq can actually sue US, and demand UN sanctions.
And should Iraq government do nothing — it will be responsible for a resistance that will ensue. It is just a question of time.
It looks like we are trying to revive Sunni Islamic Caliphate.
“US is not in war with Iran.”
I know that is true but every time I hear it, I chuckle to myself.
I know that is not true. How are sanctions finally enforced ? Assasination ?….The is begging someone to escalate…if you go 90mph in a 25mph zone, are you not speeding because you didn’t get caught ?
Actually, I meant I upchuck, but I know she’s talking about declared wars and not terrorism like sanctions and assassinations.
Maybe it’s only “war” when you or yours die as a result….
At the level of emotional reality in the West, yeah more or less. If its not personal, its not enough.
Emotional thinking would no more consider the irrationale of being upset about being dead, (being dead having no mortal concerns), than consider an invaded region having the right to fight back.
Everythings a bubble waiting to be popped.
The U.S. has yet to receive a formal written eviction notice from the Iraqi government, without which all else is legislative theatre.
Even this site gets it wrong and follows the MSM lies about the amount of Iraqi`s at the Friday protest march in Iraq.
Iraqis march in ‘millions’ to call for expulsion of US troops
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/01/24/616953/Baghdad-anti-US-rally
Are you aware of any credible, non-biased source for the numbers involved?
How can i tell a person to look if he chooses not to see?
I was looking before you told me to look. I do my best to assess sources for credibility and bias instead of just picking the team I like and pretending they always get it right.
The accounts I’ve seen so far are US state media (‘tens of thousands”), Iranian state media (“millions”), Russian state media (“thousands”), and various supposedly non-state, but almost always state-influenced (especially in the US), media reporting similar combinations of numbers.
It’s hard to tell, but the source for the aerial photos of the demonstrations in Baghdad, which seem on some rough body-per-foot math to show a turnout in the low to mid six figures in that city, seems to be Alghadeer, which is owned by a Sadrist organization.
On the one hand, if they got, say, 300-400k in Baghdad, maybe they got their million nationwide with large turnouts in Basra, Najaf, etc.
On the other hand, I wonder, would a Sadrist organization conceivably bias its reporting to inflate perceived turnout toward the numbers its leader appealed for?
This debate is starting to feel like Trump’s inauguration crowd metaphysics.
Let us say crowd was large, even extraordinary large. And other cities have had large turnouts.
The most important conclusion is that Sadr has made the point. Hope it will not be ignored.
Good point Bianca.
That would go some way: I think it would be better to say the crowd was at least an order of magnitude larger than the anti-regime protests in Iran – and those protests were touted by the US press as evidence that the Iranian government was unpopular with its own citizenry.
From the aerials, it looks like the current protests were most like 2 orders of magnitude larger: O(10⁵) versus O(10³) for the Iranian ones.
And of course Iran’s population is more than double Iraq’s… which makes the US-orchestrated anti-regime protests even more laughable.
“This debate is starting to feel like Trump’s inauguration crowd metaphysics.”
I’m not arguing about the size of the crowd.
I’m arguing over whether a claim from Iranian or Russian state media, or from media owned by the organization backing the event, are automatically credible. They’re not.
Pretty much all of us here understand that US state media and “mainstream” media are biased.
Some of us here don’t seem to understand that those other sources aren’t necessarily any more truthful or objective.
All “news” these days are bias.
Readers should focus on picking up on the narration of the news and not to focus on the trivialities.
Guess I’ll repeat, doesn’t matter to me how many Iraqis were there…as a US citizen, combat troops don’t belong there for any reason. In terms of liberty, you want to go to Iraq and shoot shit up, go…..pay your own way, and good hunting (won’t say from which perspective)
Just look at the overview, does that look like tens of thousands?
Why are the low numbers so important for the MSM?…. because the US wants to give the impression that the Iraqis wants the US to stay in Iraq.
The MSM also downplayed the numbers at the funeral in Iran….but hyped the numbers when students demonstrated after the strike on the Airliner.
To trust the MSM after its endless lies and hype….is naive.
As a note, cgi can make 10 people look like a million, and a million look like 10. The days when you can “trust your eyes” are over. Frankly, even if every Iraqi wanted US troops there, they shouldn’t be there anyway. My guess, the number of Iraqis wanting the US to stay, is equivalent to the number being directly paid by the US, one way or another.
I’ve been to a lot of Alabama football games and seen 100,000 people in one place. These pictures show a lot more than 100,000 people. I don’t know if my common-sense estimate would be deemed “credible” though.
Estimating crowd sizes can be difficult, especially since it’s possible to bias the record by omission, framing, etc.
I don’t claim to be a crowd size estimating expert. I think I do fairly well. If that Alghadeer set of photos is accurate, my guess would be 250k to 300k, and that’s in Baghdad alone, and it might not have been the only march in that large metropolitan area.
All I am saying is that simply accepting the numbers thrown around by ANY of the governments trying to tell us the size isn’t a good idea if the purpose is to figure out the true number.
Antiwar generally only repeats what reliable Western news sources are repeating, and few if any MSMs care to report the truth where the political stakes are high.
Safe to assume though, that on-the-ground estimates of a five-square mile area packed with people are close to accurate, as is the claim this supports up to two million protestors.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-news-media-hide-truths-u-s-public-supports-invasions/5701738
Antiwar began in a different era, when MSM wasn’t a thing and there was enough objective reporting such that truth was in the ballpark.
The need for the MSM to emphasize there weren’t a million Iraqi protestors, when there certainly seemed to be quite a lot, is still something of a tell to look closer.
Agree, thanks for the link.
Tens of thousands? Someone needs their eyes checked…
Anyway, if I were the Qods force, I’d make sure those boys had all the manpads and atgm’s they could possibly want.
the head of the Baghdad police force estimated around one million in total
as did Elijah
https://twitter.com/ejmalrai/status/1220668347051802624
Five square miles packed with people; at least two million.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-news-media-hide-truths-u-s-public-supports-invasions/5701738
Expect Iraqi politicians to fight the Iraqi people tooth and nail for U.S. dollars, though.
Iraqi politics is now a rough analogue to U.S. politics, where politicians are beholden to the highest bidders, corporations and billionaires, while The People are broke.
Even antiwar.com under-reports the number of protestors (by many fold).
OK, well, that implies that you know how many protesters there were.
How many protesters were there, and how do you know?
There is a common practice to put a number on demonstrations which is a best and usually honest guess based on the available information. The number is then presented it as a reliable number. But really if you don’t have enough information then the estimate should reflect that.
Whenever a number is given it should be accompanied with an error range, otherwise the number has no meaning. This error range can be somewhat implicit, as in ‘to the last significant digit’.Antiwar made the ‘best guess on available info’ claim of tens of thousands without stating there was lack of evidence. A claim of tens of thousands means you claim to know it is less than 100,000. It also means the demonstrations are ‘not politically significant’.
If you tried to find out but didn’t have enough information to decide (at that moment in time)then you can’t publish a guess as a reliable estimate and then claim ‘you can’t prove me wrong’.
The practice of drones recording the scope of demonstrations will change some of this in the sense that eventually there will be reliable numbers, but it won’t change how to handle the numbers in the early stages.
Antiwar generally only reports from reliable news sources; this by and large is the MSM.
Ditz’s core sources were London-based Reuters (by way of a U.S. newspaper) and Qatar-based Al-Jezeera.
While far from perfect, there is balance insofar as you have a solid Western source and reliable Middle Eastern source, not directly tied to the U.S. or Iran. While the U.K. and Qatar U.S. allies, they still operate with some independence regarding their own national interest.
In this case, they seem to have chosen to follow the lead of the New York City-based Associated Press, which emphasized crowds were short of a million.
Technically, AP could cheat this by simply not reporting crowds at the height of the protest. At the beginning, crowds would be smaller as not everyone had arrived, and at the end, most people would have left.
https://apnews.com/c2934966e27d5188f2419054db438aac
Non-MSM sources cite upwards of two million protesters based on measuring the length and density of protestors on the streets at peak protest time.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-news-media-hide-truths-u-s-public-supports-invasions/5701738
Throughout the day, the total number of people who participated would be well over a million, perhaps even the high figure of four million. Also, Iraqi security forces were very reluctant to engage in daylight as usual. This suggests, whatever the numbers were, they were feared. A million would do that.
If these protestors massed at the U.S. embassy and U.S. military installations and demanded Americans leave these facilities and go home, what would the Americans do? Shoot them all? With the whole world watching?
They’d probably stand down and leave. So let’s see if the Iraqi people have the courage to do this.
Odd that foreign citizens are the ones who need to have the courage to resist US warmongering….
Again! “US troops have no intention of leaving Iraq, even if asked again by the Iraqis.”
As of yet, no formal written notice of eviction has been given to U.S. troops.
The Iraqi people know they are being played, by their own government hooked on access to U.S. dollars.
If you click the link that says “tens of thousands” you’ll see that article says “thousands”. So Jason must have added the “tens”. Either way, Jason hits all the important points.
Millions in the US don’t want us there either…and our government doesn’t care one bit about their thoughts either.
The Iraqi government has yet to deliver a formal written demand that U.S. forces leave.
Iraqis aren’t stupid; they’ve surely noticed.
And unlike the politicians, the average Iraqi has no meaningful stake or share in U.S. bribes or U.S. dollar trade; sanctions and being cut off from U.S. banks will mean little to the majority who have no such income or assets.
Not even in Sunni and Kurdish areas. Deflating corrupt elites empowered by U.S. dollars in bribes and trade, would be a leveling plus for the majority of all Iraqis.