Suddenly, and without warning, the local Baghdad authorities decided, on the eve of July 17, 2013, to ban youth-oriented cafes operating in the center of the city. The authorities organized, with the cooperation of gunmen and volunteers, a campaign to shut down these cafes under the pretense that they were “incompatible with traditions and morals,” despite these cafes only serving tea and coffee at the end of the fasting day during the month of Ramadan.

The shock engendered by the Baghdad campaign was because it occurred almost one month after Baghdad’s new governor, Ali al-Tamimi, took office representing the electoral bloc of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which branded itself, during the latest local elections, as the defender of “the civil state” after entering into an alliance with cleric Ammar al-Hakim’s movement.

Baghdad’s former governor, Salah Abdul Razzaq, who is a member of Iraqi Prime-Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, had led throughout the past years continuous campaigns to close nightclubs and shops that sell liquor in Baghdad. These were attempts that a broad spectrum of citizen defenders of the civil state considered a violation of public freedoms.

But, the new campaign that began in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad’s commercial center seemed unusual and coincided with unknown people hanging posters signed by the “Karada clans” on the walls of closed cafes, claiming that their closure was a popular demand. The move was accompanied by the governor of Baghdad forming a special “emergency unit” tasked with prosecuting the owners of these cafes, and the local police affirmation that the closures were because the cafes employed underage females.