New law grants citizenship to anyone after a year of legal residency

​As soon as the Iraqi parliament passed a bill to amend the Nationality Law last week, many Iraqis have taken to social media to express their anger.

The new law states that any person who enters the country legally — and resides in it for a year legally — can get the Iraqi passport.

Iraqis saw it as a new "disaster" for their country.

Iraq, they said, had already suffered so much from the scourge of war and corruption.

The desultory reconstruction of Mosul and other Sunni areas risks creating a new pool of recruits.

​Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi holds the world responsible for rebuilding Iraqi cities destroyed in the war to liberate them from Islamic State’s control. Noting the great sacrifice in blood by Iraqi forces in that war, Abdul Mahdi told a press conference this week, “The world has to repay the favor in terms of the security, stability and stopping the movement of displacement to other countries. The world has to repay the favor to Iraq to rebuild its areas.”

Abdul Mahdi is right. The world does have a direct interest in putting Iraq together again: the longer war-ravaged cities like Mosul remain in ruins, the more bitter their populations will become, and the more susceptible to the ideology of resentment and revenge peddled by terrorist groups. A revival of IS and al-Qaeda in Iraq would endanger us all.

But here’s the problem: the world can’t help Iraq when Abdul Mahdi is so obviously uninterested in helping his own countrymen. His government’s desultory reconstruction efforts are evident in western Mosul, which suffered the greatest damage during the war. Nearly two years after its liberation, large parts of Iraq’s second-largest city remain almost exactly as they were when IS forces were ejected--in ruin.

Estimates of Mosul’s reconstruction cost range from $1 billion to $2 billion. And yet, Abdul Mahdi’s government, has only allocated $120 million for Nineveh province, of which Mosul is capital, in this year’s budget. This is a pitiful sum for  OPEC’s second-largest oil exporter, with monthly export revenues of about $8 billion.

A new cybercrimes law that would impose heavy prison sentences and hefty fines against peaceful critics who express themselves online would be a devastating setback for freedom of expression in Iraq, Amnesty International said today.

The organization has highlighted its serious concern over the draft “Law on Information Technology Crimes” in an open letter signed by nine other NGOs. The letter was submitted to the Iraqi authorities this morning and warns that the proposed law would “establish a climate of self-censorship in the country.”

“If passed, this draconian cybercrime law will be a devastating blow for freedom of expression in Iraq. The vague and overly broad wording of the law means it could easily become a tool for repression in a country where the space for critical voices is already severely restricted,” said Razaw Salihy, Iraq researcher at Amnesty International. 
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The proposed law would criminalize acts that fall under freedom of expression and give Iraqi authorities excessive powers to impose harsh sentences, including life imprisonment, for vaguely worded offences such as undermining the country’s “independence, peace and political, military security and economic interests”. 

During a meeting with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi in Baghdad, Abdul-Mahdi said that the joint region can be like the industrial region Iraq has with Jordan.

He noted that expansion of relations is beneficial for both countries.

For his part, Araqchi expressed hope that the two countries would expand ties. He also told reporters that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani plans to visit Iraq in the near future.

He noted that Rouhani’s visit will be a turning point in bilateral relations.
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Good agreements will be signed during Rouhani’s visit, he added.



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Corruption and Discrimination Intertwined

​Iraqi authorities in Nineveh are harassing, threatening, and arresting aid workers, even bringing bogus terrorism charges against them, undermining their work, Human Rights Watch said today. In some cases, local authorities are also compelling organizations to stop providing services to families the authorities accuse of ISIS ties.

“As if the their working conditions aren’t difficult enough, aid workers in Mosul and other parts of Nineveh have faced baseless charges of ISIS affiliation, and have even been arrested,” said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Charges of ISIS affiliation appear to be thinly veiled attempts to get some organizations to divert aid to corrupt local authorities or to stop giving assistance to some needy families accused of having relatives in ISIS.”

Human Rights Watch spoke with two people who have been tracking harassment of and physical assaults on aid workers by government officials. The sources said that since January 2018, they had documented at least 22 incidents in Nineveh, ranging from intimidation and arrests to assault, robbery, and live fire incidents. They said that such abuses were not unique to the governorate, with similar cases happening elsewhere in Iraq. Human Rights Watch documented two cases in which authorities detained aid workers because of humanitarian work, accusing them of being affiliated with ISIS.

In one case Human Rights Watch documented in early December 2018, a local lawyer for an aid organization said that military intelligence officers arrested him, two drivers, and a group of displaced people he was trying to help to get identity documents. He said they repeatedly interrogated the group and accused them of ISIS affiliation despite running their names through security databases and confirming that they were not wanted.

​He recognizes the folly of staying in Syria and Afghanistan forever. So why is Baghdad the exception?

​The driving force behind American foreign policy in recent years has been hubris. The United States sees itself as the essential unipower, endowed with the right, indeed the duty, to intervene around the world. Any nation that gets in the way must be crushed—but in a moral, compassionate way.

Fortunately, President Donald Trump rejects Full Neocon, the foreign policy equivalent of the Full Monty. In his State of the Union speech, he declared: “Great countries do not fight endless wars.” He appears ready to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, hubris continues to dominate his administration’s policy towards another nation: Iraq.
The Bush administration invaded Iraq based on a lie and a fantasy. The former was Baghdad’s supposed possession of a nuclear program; the latter was the expectation that adoring acolytes would enthusiastically create America on the Euphrates.

Iraq is close to finalizing a deal that will allow it to import Iranian energy despite American sanctions by avoiding the U.S. dollar, an Iraqi official said.

“A big delegation came from the Iranian central bank and the idea was proposed to trade with Iran in euros,” Abdulkarim Hashim Mustafa, special adviser to Iraq’s prime minister, said in an interview Tuesday in Moscow on the sidelines of a Middle East conference hosted by the Kremlin-backed Valdai discussion club. “There are other ideas to pay in Iraqi dinars, or in oil.”

The U.S. has been pressuring Iraq to end its purchases of Iranian natural gas and electricity, which meet a large share of domestic energy needs. In the meantime, it has extended to Baghdad a temporary waiver from the sanctions targeting Iran that President Donald Trump reimposed last year after pulling out of the Iranian nuclear deal. Mustafa said
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Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s government has rebuffed the U.S. pressure to cut energy ties with Iran, adding to strained ties with Washington over Trump’s vow to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely to “watch” the Islamic Republic. The two majority Shiite neighbors have become close allies since the 2003 U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Mosul was one of the most diverse cities in the Middle East with Muslims, Christians and Jews living side by side.

Almost two years after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared it liberated from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) armed group, the Old City of Mosul remains largely in ruins. 

This historic part of Iraq's second largest city was home to half a million people before the ISIL took control in 2013. This densely populated area on the western banks of the Tigris used to be Mosul's economic centre and beating heart. ​

​The Country Is Not a U.S. Outpost Against Iran

​U.S. troops are on their way out of Syria. In Afghanistan, a similar drawdown, perhaps even a permanent exit, is in the offing as peace talks with the Taliban continue. On February 2, U.S. President Donald Trump turned his attention to a third crucible of conflict in the region: Iraq.

This time, however, rather than talk of a drawdown, Trump argued in an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation that U.S. troops should remain in Iraq—not just to continue to fight the Islamic State, or ISIS, but to “watch Iran.” U.S. bases in Iraq, Trump suggested, would serve as outposts for monitoring Tehran’s activities relating to “nuclear weapons or other things.”

Trump’s comments are reckless. They reflect a misguided obsession with Iran and portray Iraq as little more than a pawn in the United States’ Iran policy. Such rhetoric is poison for Washington’s relationship with Baghdad—one of the last remaining anchors for U.S. influence in a region littered with dysfunctional and counterproductive partnerships.

In 2014, as Islamic State militants were seizing large chunks of Iraqi territory and advancing toward Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of volunteers rose to the capital's defense. They joined the Shiite-dominated militias known in Arabic as the Hashd al Shaabi.

Though many of the militias were funded by neighboring Iran, they became a crucial part of the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the extremists.

That campaign all but ended last year with the defeat of Islamic State, but the Hashd is not demobilizing.
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Instead, the militias have transformed themselves into a potent government institution, political entity and economic player whose strong ties to Iran are likely to complicate U.S. foreign policy in the region.