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Cent jours de thawra, de révolution, raconte un pan de l’Irak actuel. Depuis l’automne 2019 et pour la première fois depuis des années, la société civile qui semblait comme engourdie par des décennies de violences de tous types se soulève en masse. Les Irakiens se mobilisent, par-delà leurs clivages, pour tenter de mettre à bas un système inopérant, sectaire et corrompu. Ce sont des manifestations violemment réprimées, des occupations de rues, des gamins nu-pieds face à la police anti-émeute. Une révolte à la fois déterminée et naïve, le cri de rage et d’espoir de toute une génération.

Irak: One Hundred days of Thawra

January 2020. It turned out that my Iraqi friends were wrong. That was my first thought when I got back to Baghdad after a few weeks away. For years, they had only had one way of talking about the future: “There is no future here, no hope, and no prospect of things ever changing.” But the current situation now seems to be proving them wrong. In October 2019, a popular uprising by civil society emerged in protest against the government; as the protesters say it is the thawra, the revolution. It is quite extraordinary for this to have occurred at a time when society seemed numbed by years or rather decades of violence: dictatorship, invasion, civil war, terrorist attacks, kidnappings, lies, corruption, and oppression, all in the name of the State or religion. The movement had been going on for nearly a hundred days, and it was not just a matter of protesting against a government, a Prime Minister or a situation at a specific point in time, but rather an attempt to bring down a dysfunctional and corrupt system, rotten from within, attacked by the gangrene of interference by foreign powers.