Beijing and Moscow hope to use inroads into Iraq opened by the pandemic to build greater influence in the Middle East

​The Covid-19 pandemic starkly illustrates the state of health care in the Middle East, from the good to the truly wretched. The condition of local health systems has, in turn, offered opportunities to outside powers to boost their influence in the region. And no country in the Middle East offers better opportunity – in terms of size and geo-strategic importance – than Iraq. It is being seized upon.

The pandemic hit Iraq’s already fragile health system like a freight train. After decades of conflict, corruption and mismanagement, the Iraqi health system was on the brink of collapse even before the pandemic. Now, it is in utter turmoil.

Misinformation has spread like a plague, from claims about a locally manufactured therapeutic (not really) to conspiracy theories about the weaponization of the Covid-19 coronavirus (not really, either). They have contrived to create conditions that have allowed Covid-19 to spread through the population beyond the ability of the government to exert any control.

As of mid-September, Iraq had nearly 300,000 cases of Covid-19 and more than 8,000 resulting deaths in a population of 39 million. By comparison, Egypt, with a population of 99 million, recorded 101,000 cases and about 5,500 deaths. Crucially, Egypt has managed to suppress the curve and currently is recording about 150 new cases a day. The trajectory of infections in Iraq, however, continues to climb, and new cases number around 4,000 each day.

My heart sank as my colleague told me recently about the latest torture victim from Iraq who had contacted us to share his story. I had heard the same kinds of accounts from other victims of torture in detention, including the same names of two lieutenants and a major who he said had supervised and participated in torturing him and others.

I had sent those same names to Faik Zaidan, the head of the Iraqi High Judicial Council in April 2019, after earlier victims shared them with me, asking the council to investigate their actions. In fact, at Human Rights Watch, we have reported on torture in Iraq for decades, but it continues.

It is clearly futile to keep calling on the Iraqi government to address the systemic use of torture and inhuman prison conditions on its own. Outside help is needed. Iraq’s Parliament should ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture. This would allow an independent United Nations team to visit prisons in Iraq and advise and assist Iraq in strengthening protections against torture. And short of parliamentary action, the new prime minister can act to uphold the dignity of his fellow citizens and reverse the country’s shameful record on torture in detention.

The young man who contacted us recently, now 22, told my colleague that as a boy of 17, he smuggled himself out of the city of Mosul in early 2015 after the Islamic State (ISIS) took control. He made his way to Iran for surgery he had needed for years. He returned to Mosul in May 2017, after Iraqi forces, with U.S. military support, retook the city.

A few weeks before I deployed to Iraq as a young US military officer, in the spring of 2003, my French-born father implored me to watch The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s dramatic reenactment of the 1950s Algerian insurgency against French colonial rule. There are many political and aesthetic reasons to see this masterpiece of cinéma vérité, not least of which is its portrayal of the Algerian capital’s evocative old city, or Casbah.

One winter morning in 2014, more than a decade after I first saw the film, I took a stroll down the Casbah’s rain-washed alleys and into the newer French-built city. Scenes from the black-and-white movie—like the landmark Milk Bar café where a female Algerian guerrilla sets off a bomb that kills French civilians—jumped to life. The ensuing French military response, memorably depicted in the film, included arbitrary arrests, torture, and “false flag” bombings that only inflamed the Algerian insurrection. 

It was these moral perils of counterinsurgency that my father hinted at. “Keep your eyes open,” he told me. This was a prescient warning, one that served as the backdrop for my deployment, even if the Algerian analogy was imperfect and would become overused. As American soldiers soon faced a guerrilla and civil war in Iraq for which they were woefully ill-equipped, intellectually and militarily, The Battle of Algiers would be screened and discussed at the Pentagon. To this day, it is taught to West Point cadets as a cautionary tale. 

Still, the full weight of the film’s lessons was not apparent to me in Iraq until one morning in the summer of 2003, when I received an urgent phone call about a captured Iraqi intelligence officer. My commander wanted me to go interview him at the Baghdad hospital where he was being treated for unspecified wounds. ​

The executive director of the Moscow-based CIS-Europe Monitoring Organization says “if one is not satisfied with the idea of non-state terrorist actors and wants to put the blame for the 9/11 (attacks) on one particular country, Saudia Arabia is much more proper choice than Afghanistan or Iraq.”

In an interview with the Tehran Times, Stanislav Byshok, says “I'm in no way defending the principle of collective responsibility, though. I'm just reminding that bin Laden's plot had more connections to that country, not others.”

Bin Laden, the mastermind of al-Qaeda who engineered the September 11 attacks on the U.S. World Trade Center and Pentagon, was raised in Saudi Arabia. Even 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. 

Saudi Arabia and the United States supported religious fanatics, who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These fanatics who emerged under the name of al-Qaeda were inspired by the Salafist ideology propagated in Saudi Arabia.
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The following is the text of the interview with Byshok:

Over 2,000 US troops are said to be pulled from Iraq, the US Central Command chief said. Germany also announced that it would reduce the number of troops it has in the Middle Eastern country.

​The United States said on Wednesday that it would reduce its troop presence in Iraq this month as President Donald Trump seeks to fulfill his campaign promise of "ridding the country of endless wars."

The move comes as Trump has been under fire after The Atlantic magazine published an expose where anonymous White House sources said he had denigrated dead American soldiers as ''losers'' and ''suckers." He has denied the statements made in the magazine.

Marine General Frank McKenzie, the US Central Command commander, announced the reduction from 5,200 military personnel to 3,000 during a visit to Iraq.

Iraq’s federal government has requested that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) cut its oil production by 120,000 barrels per day (bpd), Iraq’s state news agency INA quoted a KRG minister as saying on Wednesday.

The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s domestic oil consumption is at 30,000 bpd, INA quoted Khaled al-Shawani, the KRG minister responsible for dealing with Baghdad, as saying.
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Baghdad and the Kurds are discussing several scenarios for an agreement over production cuts, al-Shawani said.

About 20,000 doctors have fled Iraq in recent years over threats and targeted killings, severely hampering healthcare.

​After graduating from the College of Medicine last year, Dr Omar al-Shimmari felt pretty confident and was convinced he would soon take the first step in a long career path.

But the reality was different. Instead, he has become a pharmaceutical sales representative - a job he dislikes but needs for the paycheque.
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Going door-to-door to provide product information to doctors and to persuade them to prescribe the drugs to patients "is not a decent job for a doctor, but I have no other choice to make ends meet", al-Shimmari said.

Iraq's agriculture industry has been hit hard as a result of ongoing Iranian dam projects which reduce the water flow and block major water supplies from two of the region's main rivers

Iraq’s agriculture industry has been hit hard as a result of ongoing Iranian dam projects which reduce the water flow and block major water supplies from two of the region’s main rivers, Middle East Eye reported.

Farmers in the eastern province of Diyala and the Kurdish region say their livelihoods are under threat as a result of Tehran re-directing the Sirwan and Little Zab rivers to dams in Iran, forcing some Iraqis to leave their towns and villages.

The two rivers in Iraq are considered the primary sources of livelihood for nearly two million people.
“In a couple of years, Iran’s dams projects will not only create a catastrophe that will force people to migrate to other places, but will have an impact on farmland, wildlife and tourism,” Director of Iraq’s Darbandikhan Dam Rahman Khani told Middle East Eye.



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Canada's assessments of U.S. policy, Iraq's weapons capabilities, regional implications of an invasion and resulting instability proved to be generally on the mark

A new research paper says Canadian intelligence assessments on Iraq were generally accurate in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 — unlike reports produced in Washington and London that were used to justify war.

Almost nothing has been said outside government circles about Canadian judgments that Saddam Hussein had no active weapons of mass destruction program, the paper says — partly to avoid embarrassing American and British counterparts.

“Canada’s intelligence assessments on Iraq in 2002 and 2003 subsequently turned out to be largely correct, while the analysis of most other countries on key Iraq issues — as far as is publicly known — was flawed,” concludes the paper, recently published in the journal Intelligence and National Security.