The mostly Shiite protesters have taken to chanting, “Iran! Out! Out!” Protesters have burned Iranian flags and torn down posters of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who blamed the United States and Western intelligence agencies for the protests in Iraq — and Lebanon — and called upon Lebanon and Iraq to “stabilize these security threats.” On Sunday, protesters attacked the Iranian consulate in Karbala.

The protesters are calling for a nationalist government not beholden to any external power and have singled out Iran because it controls a majority of political parties and militias in Iraq. Tehran had sent Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, to Baghdad to oversee the militant response to the uprising. General Suleimani has ensured that Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi does not resign, despite the latter indicating that he is willing to do so.

Images emerging from cities like Nasiriya, Basra and Baghdad generate a mixture of hope and fear. The courage of the protesters has given Iraq hope that change is possible, and the brutality of the response by the government forces and Iran-backed militias has shown that Tehran and its clients will do everything in their power to protect their interests and investments. Iran today relies on Iraq to circumvent international sanctions, sell its gas and agricultural products, and project its power in the Arab world.

Young Iraqis continue protesting night after night, defying the government’s repeated attempts to impose a curfew. The political class, which remains barricaded in the Green Zone and disconnected from the street, does neither know nor understand the activists leading the protests.

The callousness of the Iraqi government was epitomized by its recent statement that it did not know the identity of government snipers who shot and killed numerous protesters in Baghdad.

As the protest enters the second month, the Sunni-majority provinces and cities have been sitting out the protests for fear of being branded Baathists or Islamic State supporters. They also worry about a return to lawlessness that they endured when the Iraqi state collapsed between 2014 and 2017. Some protesters from these provinces have joined the protests in Baghdad, carrying banners expressing solidarity from their cities.

Although economic deprivation and political collapse drove Iraqis to the streets, a sense of pride has risen out of the protests and cohered around the ultimate demand to see Iraq as a sovereign country.