Protester killed in Baghdad, dozens injured across Iraq

BAGHDAD: A protester was shot dead Tuesday in the Iraqi capital and dozens more were wounded across the country´s south, where burning tyres blocked highways and thick black smoke blanketed its restive cities.

The casualties in clashes with security forces were the latest episode of violence in the nearly two-month-old grassroots movement demanding the total overhaul of Iraq´s political class. At least 350 people have been killed and around 15,000 wounded since the protests broke out on October 1 in Baghdad and the Shiite-majority south. The latest victim fell in Baghdad, shot by a rubber bullet near Al-Ahrar bridge, which leads to a cluster of government buildings on the west bank of the river Tigris.

Fearing protesters would cross it to storm those offices, security forces have sealed off Al-Ahrar and used volleys of tear gas, rubber bullets and live fire to keep crowds back. Demonstrators -- most of them teenagers -- throw rocks from behind their own makeshift barricades in daily skirmishes that have transformed the historic heart of Baghdad into a flashpoint.

The clashes left another 18 demonstrators wounded near Al-Ahrar on Tuesday, according to a medical source. Many of the young men had been there for days or weeks without going home, with one telling AFP: "We won´t leave unless it´s in coffins."

"Either way, I´ve got no job, no money, so whether I stay here or go home, it´s all the same," said another. An Iraqi tricolour tied around his shoulders, he went on bitterly: "I´ll never be able to get married without work or a salary, so I´ve got no family and no home anyway." Coloured smoke bombs went off all around them, filling the colonnaded streets with puffs of orange, green and purple.

In the south, it was protesters themselves who were responsible for smoke. They burned tyres along highways outside the city of Diwaniyah, blockading main bridges and one of the province´s three power stations. In the city itself, massive crowds marched through the streets, tearing down posters of politicians and drumming on them with their shoes to insult them.

"It´s been two months, we´re sick of your promises," they chanted. Indeed, public anger over a lack of jobs fueled the latest grassroots protests, which are Iraq´s most widespread -- and deadliest -- in decades.