They have a chance to clean house in upcoming elections, but many Iraqis are asking, 'Why should I vote?'

BAGHDAD - It was only a few weeks into Iraq's chaotic electoral campaign when Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's top religious cleric and a figure revered by millions of Shiites, dropped a bombshell.

All officials, past and present, should not serve again, al-Sistani told fellow clerics, who told the media.

"He who has been tried should not be tried," he reportedly said.

It was a wholesale rebuke of the country's political class and its often corrupt ways.

In the weeks that followed, officials engaged in semantic somersaults, interpreting and reinterpreting Sistani's words in an attempt to exempt themselves from the cleric's ire, while Iraqis of all stripes took to social media, echoing his call to remove those in power.

But with the country's parliamentary elections set for