AP, Baghdad, 7 August 2015

Thousands of Iraqis braved the scorching summer heat to stage a huge protest in central Baghdad on Friday, calling on the prime minister to dissolve the parliament and sack corrupt government officials.
Security forces and riot police sealed off Iraq’s iconic Tahrir Square and searched anyone who entered the area, but tens of thousands of men, women and children thronged the sprawling square, waving Iraqi flags.
“In the name of religion, the thieves robbed us,” they chanted long into the evening.
This is the second Friday of protests in Baghdad and across Iraq, with people initially calling on authorities to address the country’s chronic electricity problems as temperatures in the capital soared above 50 degrees Celsius (123 Fahrenheit). The call for a government shake-up intensified.
Discontent is rising, even among the country’s Shiite majority, with protests springing up in cities from Baghdad to Basra.
“Change, that’s what we need,” said schoolteacher Najlaa Malek, one of the protesters in the square Friday. “The problems in this country have become too many to list.
It added that the premier “pledges to announce a comprehensive plan of reform and work on the implementation” of a reform program.
Shiite factions in Iraq turned against al-Abadi’s predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki largely because they saw him as a domineering leader who monopolized power and allowed widespread corruption.
Critics say al-Maliki staffed the military’s officer corps with incompetent loyalists, playing a major role in the army’s collapse in the face of the IS advance. Sunni factions made similar accusations.
Similar anti-government protests took place in Iraq at the height of the pan-Arab uprising in 2011, but al-Maliki took heavy-handed measures to suppress any calls for change.
Protesters say that much of the country’s domestic problems have been sidelined as a result of the war with the Islamic State group, and that senior government officials are turning a blind eye to problems that have plagued Iraq for decades.
Al-Maliki, who now holds the largely symbolic role of vice president, issued a statement late Friday calling on the government to “tackle the offenders financially and politically.”
In a televised speech Friday, Iraq’s speaker of parliament, Salim al-Jabouri, said that the parliament “will interrogate all the ministers in the government who the protesters demand to be questioned.”
“We do not hesitate in questioning both those suspected of theft,” al-Jabouri, Iraq’s most senior Sunni politician, added but called on the demonstrators “exercise their constitutional right” without turning to violence.