Overseas Operations Bill amounts to a 'de facto decriminalisation of torture' and an effort to draw a line under British forces' involvement in abuses in Iraq, according to ex-officers

​Concerns are growing among human rights groups and ex-soldiers about UK government plans for a new law to protect British soldiers from prosecution for any acts of murder or torture committed after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The draft law, known as the Overseas Operations Bill, proposes to prevent service personnel from being prosecuted for any crime committed more than five years earlier, other than in exceptional circumstances.

It would also protect British forces from prosecution in the UK for war crimes or crimes against humanity once those crimes were more than five years old. 

The measures have alarmed NGOs who fear that any weakening of the criminal measures against torture would undermine the UK’s commitment to the Geneva Conventions.

The British army’s choice of unqualified junior officers to lead its police investigations unit during and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq contributed to soldiers escaping accountability for abuses, former members of the unit have told Declassified UK.

​Senior army commanders pressured a junior officer to stop an internal investigation into a British war crime in Iraq, writing it off as an “unfortunate incident in war”, a former member of the Royal Military Police’s Special Investigations Branch (SIB) has told Declassified UK. 

Another former senior SIB officer has said that British paratroopers should have been convicted of killing another Iraqi but they escaped punishment when a trial collapsed after failings in an SIB investigation. 

Declassified UK has spoken to four former soldiers in the SIB, which deployed to the Iraq conflict in 2003 alongside conventional troops, ready to investigate serious incidents involving UK forces, including potential British war crimes. None wanted to be named.
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Decisions were made not to send sufficiently qualified senior investigating officers to command the SIB during the invasion and early tours, the former SIB members said. This made it easier for the army’s senior command to influence the investigations into abuses and created a backlog of unresolved cases, they say.

The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq accused the Iraqi government and Shabak militia Thursday of torturing prisoners in jails in Nineveh governorate, Anadolu reports.

“Detainees in the government’s and militia’s prisons in Iraq are subjected to heinous crimes that go against human nature,” the association’s general secretariat said in a statement.

“A report issued Wednesday by the Iraqi Center for Documentation of War Crimes revealed extensive human rights violations that are systematically taking place in intelligence prisons in Nineveh governorate at the hands of intelligence agents and the militia, known as the Shabak militia,” the statement added.
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There has been no comment from the Iraqi government.

Iran and Iraq have reached an initial deal to build a long highway that would ease traffic across the border and help boost trade between the two neighboring countries, an official said.

​Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami said on Wednesday that the 354-kilometer highway would connect the city of Mehran on the western Iranian border to the holy city of Najaf in central Iraq.

“The Mehran-Najaf Highway could be a high-potential road for transit and trade exchanges between the two countries in addition to the function it would have for transporting the pilgrims,” Eslami said.

​The minister added that Iranian and Iraqi officials had concluded “initial talks” for building the key road, Press TV reported.

A study by the Iranian parliament shows that nearly two million Iraqis visit Iran each year for pilgrimage purposes. The number of Iranians visiting Iraq for a similar reason is around 700,000 although over two million Iranians arrive in Iraq during the Arba'een period, a special religious occasion which takes place in the second month of the Islamic calendar.

Entrenched corruption squeezes the very farmers the government's preferential price programme is meant to support.

​Madaen, Iraq - Dozens of trucks heaped with golden piles of wheat smouldered in the summer heat outside the government-run silo. A group of farmers, anxious to sell their harvest, crowded the reception area, guarded by gun-toting soldiers and plain-clothed security officials.
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"My truck has been in line for 10 days," said Ibrahim Khalil, a farmer from the Madaen area, about 50km (20 miles) south of Iraq's capital Baghdad. "I'm getting tired of waiting. For every extra day, I have to pay the truck driver extra money."

​At the heart of these delays - Al Jazeera found during more than a dozen interviews with farmers, traders and officials - lies an entrenched system of corruption that squeezes the very farmers the government's programme to buy grains at a preferential price is meant to support.

For a truck to enter the silo and pass the quality-control process, a bribe of one to two million Iraqi dinars ($800-$1,600) is required, an amount many smallholders cannot spare.

British and US troops invaded Iraq in 2003 and ousted Saddam Hussein, claiming he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Sanctions against the Iraqi oil industry were immediately dropped and dozens of Western companies rushed in to make money.

A barrister representing a British businessman accused of bribing an Iraqi oil official has told a trial in London the evidence against him included the "flimsiest of innuendos."

Adrian Eissa QC said his client, Stephen Whiteley, 65, had not been a party to any corrupt payments made by his employer, Monaco-based Unaoil via an intermediary, Basil al-Jarah.

​​Whiteley is accused, along with Ziad Akle, 45, and Paul Bond, 68, of conspiracy to give corrupt payments to Oday Al Quoraishi, an official in Iraq’s state-owned South Oil Company in return for a lucrative contract for single point moorings (SPM) equipment between 2009 and 2010.

Evacuations in response to worker protest at Basra Gas Co to demand payment of delayed salaries, say Shell executives.

​Royal Dutch Shell evacuated some 60 foreign staff from Iraq's Basra Gas Company (BGC) as a security measure following a protest over delayed pay, company officials said on Thursday, adding production was unaffected.
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The staff were flown out of the country on Wednesday after workers protested at the headquarters of BGC, a joint venture between state-owned South Gas Company, Shell and Mitsubishi, to demand payment of their delayed salaries, officials said.

​"Shell confirms that as result of a security breach at the accommodation camp of Basra Gas Company, we have temporarily relocated Shell secondees," Shell said in emailed comments.

​Tehran pushed Shia factions to support Kadhimi as Iraq's new PM in return for US unfreezing some of its assets in Europe

A "behind-the-scenes deal" between the US and Iran has paved the way for the designation of Mustafa al-Kadhimi as Iraq's new prime minister, according to the London-based Middle East Eye (MEE).

As part of the deal, Tehran agreed to support al-Kadhimi, a former director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, on condition that Washington would stop freezing some of its assets in Europe, MEE said.

Kadhimi's designation was strongly rejected by pro-Iranian Kataib Hezbollah, a Shia militia, and several political leaders.

Nevertheless, other Shia political factions affiliated with Iran gave green light to his nomination after Iran ordered them to stand by al-Kadhimi in return for some relieving from US sanctions which impose a heavy burden on the Iranian economy, MEE quoted senior Iraqi political sources as saying.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Iraq has one of the highest numbers of missing people in the world. The International Commission on Missing Persons, which has been working in partnership with the Iraqi government to help recover and identify the missing, estimates that the number could range from 250,000 to one million. Since 2016, Human Rights Watch has been documenting continued enforced disappearances by Iraqi security forces. As far as the organization is aware, authorities in Baghdad and in the Kurdistan Region have done little to punish officers implicated in disappearances.

Enforced Disappearances from 2014 to 2017

In 2018, Human Rights Watch issued a report that documented 78 cases of men and boys forcibly disappeared in Iraq between April 2014 and October 2017. The majority of these 78 people were detained in 2014, with the most recent in October 2017. In three more cases, men who were detained and disappeared in 2014 and 2015 later were released. They said they had been detained for periods ranging from 34 to 130 days by the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF or Hashad, formally under the control of the prime minister) or the National Security Service in unofficial detention sites. All said they had been beaten throughout their time in detention.
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Military and security forces apprehended 34 of the 78 men and boys at checkpoints as part of anti-Islamic State (also known as ISIS) terrorism screening procedures and another 37 at their homes. All the disappearances at checkpoints but one targeted people who are from or lived in areas that were under ISIS control. In most cases of people arrested at home, security forces gave the families no reason for the arrests, although most of the families suspect the reasons were related to the detainees’ Sunni Arab identity. In at least six of these cases, the circumstances or what arresting officers said indicated that they were at least potentially related to the fight against ISIS.

Dr. Marwa al-Khafaji’s homecoming after 20 days in a hospital isolation ward was met by spite. Someone had barricaded her family home’s gate with a concrete block.
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The message from the neighbors was clear: She had survived coronavirus, but the stigma surrounding the disease would be a more pernicious fight.

The young physician was catapulted into the front lines of Iraq’s battle with the virus in early March. The Associated Press followed her tale from inside a squalid quarantine room to her return to the streets of her childhood, where she found piercing glares had displaced greetings.

​Her struggles mirror those of Iraq’s battered health system, laid bare by the pandemic: Hospitals without supplies, medical staff intimidated by an unknown disease, and widespread stigma associated with infection.