Years of of lethal state failure have devastated the people of Iraq, whose daily life today is fraught with challenges, with little hope in sight

​Ramadan is drawing to an end. In Baghdad, imams lead pious worshippers for Taraweeh prayers in the evening. The recitation of dua echoes across neighbourhoods like a chorus of pleading voices ascending to the heavens above.

Iraq is a wounded nation still wading through the murky waters of adversity.

Around sunset, just before families gather for the iftar meal to break their fast, the city’s destitute come wandering, going from door to door. They are mostly children who lost parents in one of the many days of blood that have soaked Iraq’s calendar since 2003.

They are pale and hungry, and there are so many of them, almost everywhere.

The arrest and conviction of journalists and activists has revived concerns over a government dominated by two clans

The nightmare began for Sherwan Sherwani when six police cars pulled up outside his family home on the outskirts of Erbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region. At least 10 officers stormed the house and chased the 38-year-old freelance journalist upstairs, eventually pinning him down with a gun to his head. The arrested man was later accused by the region’s prime minister of espionage.

His wife, Rugash Izzadin Muhaeiddin, who witnessed the October 7 arrest alongside two of their children aged eight and 12, describes it as “terrifying and brutal”. She says she knew her husband had a dangerous job. For nearly 15 years he had written articles criticising the Kurdistan Regional Government, which holds semi-autonomous rule over Iraq’s majority Kurdish territories.

He had brushed off earlier pleas from his wife to stop writing. And ignored his family’s traditional support for the ruling Kurdistan Democratic party — controlled by the powerful Barzani family — to continue reporting on anti-government protests, alleged human rights abuses and land grabs by officials. “[The authorities] had been accumulating what they call these crimes, [his criticism], for a long time,” says Muhaeiddin, an economics teacher.

​Sherwani was one of five people from north-west Iraqi Kurdistan to be rounded up and arrested in October. What they had in common was their involvement in either organising or reporting on anti-government protests over unpaid public sector wages in 2020. All were later charged with threatening national security. A week before their trial opened in February, Masrour Barzani, KRG prime minister, told reporters that the detainees were “neither activists nor journalists. Some of them were spies, they spied for other countries”.​

These groups are undermining efforts to improve Erbil-Baghdad relations and reestablish security in the north.

​On April 15, a drone laden with explosives targeted military facilities hosting US troops in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), but resulted in no casualties. On the same day, rocket fire on a Turkish military base in Mosul’s Bashiqa region killed one Turkish solider.

The attacks, attributed to pro-Iran factions based in Iraq, have been widely seen in the context of the US-Iran and Turkey-Iran rivalries in the region. However, such analysis ignores an important development linked to these incidents: the attempt of Iranian-backed paramilitaries in northern Iraq to consolidate their power in territories disputed between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

The presence and growing strength of these groups have profound implications not only for the future of Baghdad-Erbil relations, but also for inter- and intra-communal relations in these ethnically-diverse regions. Since their arrival, Iran-backed paramilitaries have transformed the nature of the dispute over these territories from a conflict between two governments, to a very complex situation characterised by deep militarisation of ethno-religious and sectarian identities in Nineveh and Kirkuk governorates.

The Biden administration’s plans are in place to (mostly) end the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan. But don’t expect a conclusion to the 18-year war in Iraq any time soon.
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“We’re going to stay in Iraq,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie told Military Times for a report published in April, supplying four rationales for that choice: the Islamic State, Iran, Baghdad and Afghanistan. Each excuse was as wrongheaded as the last, and none justify prolonging the heir-apparent to the notorious title of America’s longest war.

“We’re going to be there, our NATO partners are going to be there,” McKenzie first said, “to finish the ISIS fight.” What exactly does that mean? The mission to reclaim territory from ISIS in Iraq has been completed for nearly four years. It is also complete in Syria, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed himself during a U.S. raid in 2019. The Islamic State’s “ability to reemerge is extremely low right now,” Lt. Gen. Paul Calvert, who leads the U.S.-led coalition fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told Defense One in March.

Though Calvert also noted that could change, the same can be said of any of the many extremist militant groups in the Middle East that are enemies of the United States but pose only a limited threat — certainly not a threat that justifies ongoing occupation of Iraq. The idea that we will “finish the ISIS fight” in the sense McKenzie seems to envision (eliminating all remnants of the group by military means) is wildly unrealistic. It is also unnecessary for U.S. security, which is to say, endlessly pursuing ISIS stragglers is no reason to stay in Iraq.

​The Iraqi and Syrian oil ministers talked about the possibility of transporting Egyptian gas to Iraq through Syria during a meeting in Baghdad.

​The Iraqi and Syrian oil ministers met in Baghdad on Thursday to discuss the importation of Egyptian gas and enhanced energy cooperation between Iraq and Syria. 

Iraqi Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismail hosted his Syrian counterpart Bassem Touma for an official visit. The two discussed the possibility of transporting Egyptian gas to Syria and then overland to Iraq. They also talked about strengthening energy cooperation, holding joint training and sharing information, according to a press release from Iraq’s Oil Ministry. 

Iraq is rich in oil, but is heavily dependent on neighboring Iran for natural gas and electricity. The gas is especially needed for power plants in summer when people rely on cooling systems in the scorching heat. In recent years, Iraq has sought to obtain gas from elsewhere, particularly Egypt and Qatar. 
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The United States sanctions countries who import Iranian gas, and Iraq had to receive waivers from Washington during the Trump administration. Though the United States may soon remove some of these sanctions under President Joe Biden, Iraq may still see benefits in weaning itself off Iranian gas. Iraq’s current gas exemption to the Iran sanctions is valid through July. 

The China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) last week signed a 25-year deal with Iraq’s Ministry of Oil that gives it a 49 per cent stake in the Mansuriya non-associated natural gas site. The contract, which may be extended for an additional five years, follows Sinopec’s signing of a long-term purchase and sales agreement with Qatar Petroleum’s for 2 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for a term of 10 years.

It also comes shortly after the official announcement of the multi-faceted 25-year deal between China and Iraq’s chief sponsor state, Iran, although the actual deal was struck and exclusively reported in 2019, and its later developments exclusively covered at OilPrice.com.

For its part, the U.S. State Department has been looking to re-establish a more constructive association with Iraq since relations soured months after the fall of former Iraq President, Saddam Hussein, in 2003, and the later rise of ISIS. A key element of these efforts has been to decrease the longstanding role of Iran in Iraq’s political, military, and economic spheres. The more immediate focus of Washington has been to reduce Iraq’s dependence on Iran for supplies of gas and electricity that are essential to the running of Iraq’s power grid.

​The idea has been to grant Iraq waivers to continue to import these products whilst concomitantly attempting to provide it with other options to source them. Most notably these options have included projects that will enable Iraq both to increase its output of non-associated gas from its own fields and to reduce the flaring of its associated gas to oil fields. From the U.S. perspective, which has made a massive investment in terms of ‘blood and treasure’ in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, such projects should be done ideally by Washington’s allies or by U.S. companies.

Iraqis cannot catch a break. The country has lurched from conflict to conflict since 1980, brought upon by tyrannical leaders, extremists and sectarian militias and hegemonic or occupying powers. Now, instead of air strikes and suicide bombs, they suffer and die because of corruption and negligence – signifiers of a decrepit ruling order that thinks people's lives have no value.

​At the weekend, tragedy struck again. At least 82 people died in a fire, most of them Covid-19 patients and their families, and 110 others were injured as the flames consumed parts of Ibn Al Khateeb hospital in a poor suburb of Baghdad.

Iraq is in the midst of another debilitating coronavirus surge. It is one of the hardest hit countries in the region. With over a million total cases, it is registering hundreds of infections every day.

Decades of violence and corruption have left the country of 40 million without the infrastructure to deal with the pandemic or to have enough medical staff at hand to treat the surge of patients, which is why so many families were at the Ibn Al Khateeb Covid-19 wards – they had to take care of their own loved ones.

Media reports indicated that an exploding oxygen tank was the spark that lit the flame which engulfed the hospital, a repurposed structure that was converted into a coronavirus treatment facility.

Remarkably, officials have said that the hospital lacked smoke detectors, sprinklers and working fire extinguishers. Fire escape routes were shut, and even the false ceilings and walls at the ICU were made from flammable materials, turning a centre for recovery into a death trap.

The Biden administration has made no secret of its desire to negotiate with Iran.

During the campaign, Joe Biden repeatedly criticized the Trump administration’s decision to exit the 2015 nuclear deal and urged a quick renewal to direct diplomacy. Just days after Biden’s inauguration, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan promised to fast-track negotiations. Rather than use Iran’s dire financial straits as leverage, Biden’s team sought to rebuild Iran’s hard currency reserves even prior to any Iranian commitment to return to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or, for that matter, Tehran’s nuclear non-proliferation treaty safeguards agreement.

The White House, for example, pressured Seoul to release $1 billion in frozen Iranian assets to Tehran following an Iranian seizure of a South Korean ship. White House aide Brett McGurk and State Department Iran envoy Rob Malley have likewise sought to pressure Baghdad to release nearly $4 billion from an Iran escrow account that the Iraqi government had established during the Trump administration in order to ensure that Iraq could purchase Iranian fuel while ensuring that the proceeds would not subsidize Iranian terror.

In recent weeks, Malley has traveled to Vienna to renew nuclear talks. His position has shifted quickly from tying the lifting of sanctions to Iran returning to JCPOA compliance to simply demanding a commitment to return to the status quo ante.
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The real talks, however, may not be in Vienna and may not involve Malley directly.

Thirty years ago, some classmates and I took a break from our studies at Harvard and set out on a self-appointed mission. We traveled to Iraq to investigate the true devastation caused by the U.S.-led coalition’s bombardment. Little did we know that the 1991 war would be remembered as a blip in America’s Iraq adventures, now merely called the First Gulf War, to be followed by decades of far greater devastation: 22 years of sanctions and air strikes, a Second Gulf War, military occupation, and what’s now just another one of our global endless wars.
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Today, the country remains in shambles, and the Iraqi people are left holding the bag. Purveyors of American empire and Iraqi desperation never tire of offering up fresh justifications to give the U.S. just one more go at a fix. But it really is time for the U.S. to step aside, as it’s been promising to do for far too long. For those focused on the welfare of the people of Iraq, but still driven, despite the overwhelming evidence of three decades, to seek help from the U.S. government, it’s past time to come to terms with the reality that U.S. policies have never helped the Iraqi people.

​Once on the ground in Iraq, it wasn’t that hard for our group of ten law and public-health students and experts to figure out that claims by military experts that the then-novel “smart bombs” had killed only about 2,000 civilians during the 1991 Iraq war were a snow job. What we discovered was that far from our fighting a “clean war,” as the media reported it, not only did the U.S. use hundreds of thousands of land mines, anti-personnel mines, and 24.5 million cluster bombs, it deliberately targeted 17 of 20 electrical generating plants in the country, which the Department of Defense subsequently boasted about as a “dramatic success.” These attacks virtually eliminated any ability of the Iraqi national power system to generate or transfer electricity by reducing the generating capacity to less than 300 megawatts (down from a pre-war normal of 9,500 watts). It left Iraqis without the ability to purify and distribute clean water, manage sewage systems, or operate hospitals.

Our investigation revealed that U.S. bombardment of Iraq had caused a massive spiral of infant mortality, primarily due to waterborne diseases caused by the unlawful attacks on Iraq’s electrical infrastructure.

Few countries have oil reserves as deep as Iraq.

The extractive industries bring jobs and tax revenues to a nation that has been hobbled by invasion, war and insurgency for close to two decades. Yet this economic activity comes at a cost.

Oil spills, pollution and declining air quality have taken a significant toll on the environment, and on the health of many Iraqis. On top of this, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil industry continue to contribute to global warming. Some areas of Iraq are even expected to become uninhabitable in the coming decades. 
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Yet assessing the true scale of the issue and exactly how pollution happens in Iraq is a demanding task. When applying for the Green Climate Fund in 2019, the Iraqi government together with the UN Environment Program, outlined insufficient collection of environmental data as a challenge to implementing policies countering climate change. Precise information around the sources and impact of pollution on many Iraqi communities also remains sparse, despite the best efforts of local researchers.  ​