Another activist of the October Revolution was murdered in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Tuesday. Unidentified men ambushed Salah al-Iraqi on a motorcycle in the evening hours shortly after he left his home in the Al-Jadida district east of Baghdad. According to hospital reports, five shots were fired at him. In his last post on Facebook on Tuesday afternoon, the Iraqi activist had commemorated the "martyrs of the October Revolution," writing, "The innocent die while the cowards rule."

Salah al-Iraqi was considered a leading member of the protests against the post-2003 corrupt power apparatus initiated in Baghdad's central Tahrir Square starting Oct. 1, 2019, which spread to other cities in the country shortly after. He received death threats several times and survived two assassination attempts. Millions of people have taken part in the demonstrations so far. At least 600 demonstrators have lost their lives since then, and dozens of people believed to have played leading roles in the Iraqi revolution have fallen victim to deadly attacks or extrajudicial executions. About a hundred activists have also disappeared from the face of the earth, their fate unknown.

Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, who came to power in May after Adel Abd al-Mahdi's government was forced to resign in the wake of the protests, had pledged to keep violent acts away from demonstrations and to bring those responsible to justice. But just last week, several local and international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, expressed deep concern about "lack of accountability" regarding extrajudicial executions of peaceful protesters. The organizations attribute the authorities' failure to bring perpetrators to justice to "perpetuating and further entrenching decades of impunity."