America is ignoring Iraq's turbulent protests at its peril, security experts say

Some 300 people have been killed and more than 2,000 injured as anti-government protests rocking the country of 38 million draw a harsh response from state security forces.

The second-largest OPEC producer has seen protests every summer for the last several years over economic grievances, met time and time again with empty government promises of reform that go unfulfilled. But this year's demonstrations are different, spilling over into demands for a full-on political overhaul and attracting elements like Iranian-backed forces and other extremists that threaten to hijack the protest movement and potentially bring the U.S. into deeper involvement.

"Because the forces that are outside, the external forces that have decades of interest are not going to go away quietly. They will affect the economics of the region potentially, and they can affect the security beyond the region of Europe and eventually the United States." What we do know is that our adversaries, both groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda or Iran, thrive in chaos and a vacuum. What we're seeing in Iraq today is vacuums being created and then occupied.Iraqis across the country, particularly in Baghdad and cities of the country's oil-rich south, are angry over grievances that lie at the heart of protests similarly taking place in Lebanon and Algeria: rampant state corruption, high unemployment, and a lack of basic services provision.

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