ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Muqtada al-Sadr, Iraq’s firebrand Shiite cleric, warned Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to "stop giving futile promises" and start with grassroots government reforms if he wants to avoid impeachment. "We advise the prime minister to stop giving futile promises," Sadr said in a message, convoyed by an official from his Sadrist Movement before supporters in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, where Sadr is staging a sit-in. Sadr and hundreds of his supporters entered Baghdad's Green Zone on Sunday to stage a sit-in to pressure the government on reforms. Sadr warned in his message that if the embattled prime minister fails to move on reforms, he would go to parliament to seek his impeachment. He has also warned Abadi not to "blow your anger on peaceful demonstrators, since they have been legally waging their opposition. Rather, he better blow his anger at the corrupt” officials. Abadi pledged on Tuesday that he would announce a cabinet reshuffle shortly. "We promise all parties that the reshuffling of the government cabinet will begin soon," he said, explaining that "calls for reform should not worsen the security and stability of the government." But Sadr has been pressuring Abadi to implement a wider reform package that would include replacing several ministers with apolitical technocrats, in a bid to eliminate patronage and corruption. In one instance of the wide corruption that critics say is eating up Iraq, early this month auditors in the Iraqi parliament revealed that the defense ministry had spent $150 billion on weapons in the last decade but only a fraction of that had gone to buying weapons, with the rest gong missing. Iraq’s defense ministry “is one of the most corrupt ministries,” the spokesperson for the parliamentary auditing committee, Adil Nuri, told Rudaw. The auditing committee conducted an inquiry into three new arms deals of the defense ministry last month, according to Nuri. He said he found “that the ministry had signed $350 million worth of contracts with Eastern European countries but the inquiries showed that there has been a lot of corruption in the price and types of weapons.” Sadr warns he will seek Iraqi PM’s impeachment unless reforms begin now
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