Years of living under the ISIS, and nine months of fierce fighting to liberate Mosul, have left the children of this city with dangerous levels of mental and psychological damage.  Any support from the government of Iraq for the affected children and their parents is totally missing.

The city was retaken from IS a year ago, yet the humanitarian crisis in Mosul still exists. The nine-month war to take back the city has led to its near total destruction and tens of thousands of casualties, and left great humanitarian suffering and a health crisis, especially, for children.

The children of Mosul are the first that suffered from the siege imposed by the Iraqi government, which lasted for three years, after IS invasion of the city in 2014, and caused a shortage of food, medication and lack of public healthcare services.
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These children also suffered from heavy bombardment and shelling by Iraqi forces & militias backed by US-led airstrikes, during the military operation to reclaim their city from IS. The horrific massacres, barbaric bombardment, the intensity of the sound of explosions and the scenes of dead bodies and blood in the streets of the city, in addition to the bombs that destroyed the homes of the children scarred them and have had huge impacts on their mental health.

The National Iranian Oil Company announced that Tehran’s revenues from the joint oil fields with Iraq amounted to $5 billion annually.

According to the government run IRNA news agency, the Iranian Oil Ministry announced that 300,000 barrels are produced in the oil fields west of the Karun River per day.

Iraq and Iran have been ranked as the second and third largest producers of oil in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
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Five Iraqi oil fields are located on the border with Iran, while the two countries share five other fields, it is estimated that they hold some 95 billion barrels of crude oil.



Source:   www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180611-iran-earns-5bn-annually-from-joint-oil-fields-with-iraq/

Iraq's prime minister has banned all high ranking members of the country's election commission (IHEC) from travelling abroad after citing "dangerous violations" in the recent parliamentary election.

Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr's Sairoon coalition beat all expectations on May 12 to win 54 out of 328 seats in parliament, after successfully launching an anti-corruption campaign in the impoverished, but oil-rich country.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference on Tuesday that criminal charges might be brought against some people, after he blamed electronic vote counting devices used by the IHEC, which he said hadn't been used without prior inspection for errors.
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Abadi's al-Nasr Alliance came third in the poll with only 42 seats.

I was 23 years old and only knew so much. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.

On the evening of 25 January 2007, my platoon left the gates of Forward Operating Base (FOB) Rustamiyah and snaked through the streets of East Baghdad, Iraq. Our mission was to link up with and check on some local Iraqi policemen. It was a dangerous time. Upwards of 100 U.S. soldiers were being killed each month—many, if not most, in the capital city.

We’d been in the same area the night before. A drone spotted some men carrying a long, cumbersome object in and out of a local mosque and we were tasked to respond. That’s how it went back then. We stopped the men, sat them on the curb, searched their persons and made them wait while we called in Iraqi troops to search the mosque. It was clean (no weapons), as it turned out. It also turned out that the large transported object was a coffin containing the body of a young man. We had searched, delayed, and humiliated his brothers and distraught father.
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The next night, I’d meant to bypass the mosque and take a more circuitous path. My new senior scout, who commanded the lead Humvee, and I had discussed my preferred route over a map before the mission. But when he later missed his turn and pulled onto the same, broad, mosque-laden avenue, I had neither the courage nor the confidence to correct the sergeant.

There have been a growing number of refugees fleeing Iraq since the US-led invasion to this county in March 2003. Millions of Iraqi people fled their home to escape the violence of the occupation, and the subsequent outbreak of a civil war between various sectarian groups, mainly Iran-backed militias, terrorist groups and political factions.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there is an estimate of over 4 million Iraqi refugees around the world, including 1.9 million in Iraq, 2 million in neighbouring Middle East countries, and around 200,000 in countries outside the Middle East.

Since 2006, Iraqis have been the leading nationality seeking asylum in industrialised countries, including the EU. Increasing tensions in the Middle East and the treatment of Iraqi refugees as temporary guests in the Arab states has led to increased travel distance for Iraqi asylum seekers.
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Nevertheless, Europe's performance in addressing the refugee crisis that resulted from the US-led invasion of Iraq has been widely criticised by the UNHCR, which denounced the small number of asylum applicants accepted by the EU.

​The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) recently released a statement setting out their opposition position to Iraq’s recent election and the political process in general.
 
The statement, delivered by Dr Muthanna al Dari, continued AMSI’s long-held stance against an electoral process borne from foreign occupation. He analysed the pitfalls of the latest elections specifically and the situation in Iraq more widely, before concluding by calling for a new and genuine national political settlement.

More than 200 former Iraqi high-ranking military officers are being detained in government prisons in southern and central Iraq. Most were taken as prisoners of war (POW) by the US in 2003 and 2004 after the invasion or were taken as POWs during the battles between the Iraqi army and US forces in the course of the invasion. The US handed over these Iraqi officers to the Iraqi government in 2010 before its final troop withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011. They received varied sentences, from life imprisonment to the death penalty, issued by unfair US sponsored Iraqi trials.

Most of these prisoners were senior officers including brigadier generals or had higher ranks in the Iraqi army. Some of them were pilots, members of the special forces,  the Republican Guard, navy,  infantry, the missile unit, or were experts and scientists in Iraq's former Military Industrialisation Organisation.

The prisoners are currently being held in al Hout Prison in southern Iraq, al Kadhimiya Prison in Baghdad or in two other prisons in Babil and Basra provinces. They are being held under high level  security measures, despite their old age with may suffering from serious health problems.
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Last week, the chief of staff of the Iraqi army and the commander of former Republican Guard, Eyad Khalifa Ftaih al Rawi, 76, died in prison after he had had a stroke. His daughters and sons were not allowed to see him before he died.

Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court has rejected a request to cancel the country's recent parliamentary election results over allegations of voting irregularities.

This comes after to an absence of a quorum led the Iraqi Council of Representatives to fail on Sunday for the third time to hold a scheduled meeting to pressure the Electoral Commission to reverse the results of the recent elections.

The current Iraqi parliament continues to press the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) for a recount by manually counting the electronic votes after allegations of voting irregularities after a government committee proved that the voting apparatus used in the elections was not fail proof.
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Even as only a few weeks are left for the current term of the Iraqi Parliament, controversy still surrounds Iraq’s political outcome following the parliamentary vote.

MOSUL, Iraq, May 22 (Xinhua) -- Up to 1,000 bodies were retrieved under the debris of devastated buildings in western Mosul in Iraq over the past several days, a police source said Tuesday.

"Only on Monday and Tuesday, a team from the Iraqi civil defense police retrieved 150 decomposed corpses. Some of them were of women and children," Lieut. Col. Rabie Ibrahim, head of the team, told Xinhua.

The bodies were said to be of Islamic State (IS) militants, their family members or the civilians prevented by IS militants from leaving homes during the fierce battles and heavy bombardment of the city, Ibrahim said.
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The campaign to retrieve the bodies was ordered 10 days ago by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, also the commander-in-chief of Iraqi forces, who formed a committee from the civil defense and Nineveh's provincial police to clear the devastated areas in the old city center of western Mosul for bodies.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Kuwait Energy, an independent oil and gas company, has hired investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners (PWP) to advise it on options that could include selling all or part of its Block 9 asset in southern Iraq and a spin-off of Egyptian assets, sources familiar with the matter said.

​The move is aimed at creating much-needed liquidity for the company’s shareholders and a cash buffer to repay its debt, the sources said.

Kuwait Energy and Perella Weinberg declined to comment.

The move comes after Kuwait Energy ended discussions on a possible merger with London-listed SOCO International earlier this year, saying the parties had not reached “mutually acceptable transaction terms”.