Key figures in the movement of Moqtada Sadr gathered in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, hailing a "new era" for the group exactly seven years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.
Thousands of Sadrists marched in the streets holding Iraqi flags aloft - and trampling as a mark of disrespect on those of America and Britain, chanting "Yes, yes Iraq, no, no occupation." "Those who cling to their posts must not remain," said Sheikh Hazem Al-Araji, delivering a missive directly from Sadr, who has been in self-imposed exile in Iran for the past three years.
"People decided with their votes that the hunger, arrests, terrorism and the Baathists would not return," he said.
"We are entering a new era which has no place for occupiers and oppressors ... and people who put in jail those who resisted," referring to Saddam's Baath party.
The message was deliberately aimed at Maliki, whose forces routed Sadr's now dormant Mahdi Army militia in the movement's eponymous Baghdad stronghold Sadr City and the southern city of Basra in 2008, jailing many as a result.
The Sadrists polled well in Iraq's general election last month, gaining 39 seats in the new 325-seat Parliament, making it a major player in the formation of a future coalition government.
Sadr supporters, however, have rejected the two leading candidates to lead the new government, Al-Maliki and ex-premier Iyad Allawi.
In Karbala, meanwhile, another holy city south of Baghdad, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini Al-Sistani, the war-wracked nation's most revered Shiite cleric, urged politicians to form without delay a government of national unity that "does not exclude any political component."
