Iraq ranks as the joint tenth most corrupt nation in the world according to a new report released by Transparency International, marking a small improvement in the country's fight against domestic corruption out of 180 countries investigated.
 
In their 2021 corruption perception index (CPI) published on Tuesday, the Berlin-based NGO ranked the perceived levels of corruption in Iraq as equal to the levels of abuse of power for private gain in Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and Honduras. With a score of 23 out of 100, the nation has gained two points in the index over the last year and is subsequently up three places from the bottom of the table.
 
Despite this gain, Iraq still falls far below the global average of 43 and remains perceived as one of the most corrupt countries on earth, in a country plagued by corrosive principles of “wasta” (personal connections) and politicians who appear to serve themselves above their elected representatives.
 
Albeit minor, the improvement bucks the broader trend of a stagnating fight against corruption both regionally and globally. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has received the same average result for the fourth year in a row. Worldwide, 131 countries are assessed as having made no significant progress against corruption over the last decade.

​Iran views Iraq as its most important foreign policy arena and maintains excellent and deep ties with every faction. In other words, whoever wins in the Iraqi elections, Iran wins.

Since Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr surged to victory in a widely boycotted election last October, there has been a steady stream of news reports and analyses claiming that this could represent the beginning of the end of Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs.
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While such assessments are certainly optimistic, they may perhaps be naïve. Iran is still the single most powerful entity in Iraq today, and it is extraordinarily unlikely that Tehran – with Iraq as the central lynchpin to its regional strategy – will simply allow Baghdad to set its own course.

Political wrangling continues

The most significant recent development on the political scene was the reconvening of parliament earlier this month which – despite some bloodshed and hospitalisations – managed to re-elect Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi.
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Brigadier General Ahmed Foruzandeh ran Iran’s infamous Quds Force war in Iraq that helped make Qassem Soleimani a household name.

​They're the Quds Force officers who tracked and killed Iraqis working with the U.S.-led coalition, hunted those deemed hostile to Iranian influence through a council of assassins, and smuggled the spies, money, weapons, and secrets into Iraq that sowed chaos across the country during the American occupation. 
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Qassem Soleimani first gained the attention of Western media through his role in instigating a campaign of covert violence against the U.S. in Iraq which cost the lives of over 600 American troops. But underneath the now famous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps icon, other officers managed the war that first made Soleimani notorious. 

For a period during the mid-2000s, one of those officers was Brigadier General Ahmed Foruzandeh, who rose to command the Ramazan Corps, part of the Guard’s elite Quds Force, after cutting his teeth in the unit running guerrilla warfare operations during the Iran-Iraq war.

“Although Qassem Soleimani was the architect of that broader strategy, it was his lesser known lieutenants who ran and oversaw the operations,” Dr. Afshon Ostovar, a scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School, said. “Foruzandeh was one of the top Quds Force operatives in the field in Iraq, yet his name was hardly known at the time.”

Fort Leavenworth in midsummer is a sultry campus for the Army's new leaders, American and allied majors on the fast track and generals who have just earned their first star. When Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, steps out of an Air Force Gulfstream into the Kansas heat, it is not just an overdue courtesy call and not just a peace overture to a rankled service. (He has just killed the Army's prized new $11 billion artillery piece, the Crusader.) It is one more engagement in the war over the coming war.
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The subject of his remarks, which the former political-science professor delivers seminar style to the majors and more formally to the generals, is his recent visit to Afghanistan. But Iraq is never far out of sight. Introducing Wolfowitz to an auditorium full of new one-stars and their wives, General Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, points out that as a young Pentagon analyst Wolfowitz directed a secret assessment of Persian Gulf threats that marked Iraq as a menace to its neighbors and to American interests. This, Shinseki informs them with everything but a drumroll, was in 1979, a dozen years before Desert Storm.

Wolfowitz then proceeds to use Afghanistan to illustrate how far the military's pinpoint-targeting ability has advanced since that war, when American air and ground forces, unable to communicate with one another, succeeded in destroying only a single one of Saddam Hussein's Scud missile emplacements (and that one was a harmless decoy). The message is that next time around, if there is a next time, what was demonstrated in Afghanistan -- that choreography of unmanned aerial vehicles, precision-guided weapons, indigenous insurgents and special-operations soldiers on the ground -- should, in the first hours of an attack, prove far more adroit at disabling Saddam's most fearsome weapons.

Soldiers tend to cock an eyebrow when civilians who have not known combat talk confidently about the coming conquest, but the closest thing to an open challenge this day comes during Wolfowitz's session with the majors -- from a British officer who raises a hand and asks about Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector. Ritter has been in London arguing that Iraq's destructive capability is already neutralized. So where is the threat worth spending American blood?

More than 700,000 people have signed a petition calling for former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair to have his knighthood removed.
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The ex-Labour leader, who was in power from 1997 to 2007, was given the title as the New Year's Honours were awarded.

But the petition complains that his role in the Iraq war makes him "personally responsible" for many deaths and accuses him of "war crimes".

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Sir Tony had "earned" a knighthood.

The main pillars of Iran’s approach are preventing an armed conflict or widespread violence involving its allies in Iraq, maintaining cohesion among Shiite groups, and preventing the formation of a majority government or any restructuring of the Iraqi state.

On October 10, Iraq held one of the most controversial parliamentary elections since the fall of former dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. On the one hand, there were numerous allegations of electoral fraud during and after the elections, especially from the losing parties and political factions. More than two months on, the allegations are still being investigated by the Iraqi judiciary.

On the other hand, a very low turnout in the election (about 41 percent) could be a sign that the majority of Iraqis are increasingly losing hope that a fundamental change can be achieved through the ballot box.

​This apparent public frustration results from a chaotic two-year period, marked by popular protests and unrest, state and non-state violence against civilians, fragile political alliances, and intensified foreign intervention. From this perspective, the mere low turnout in the elections, regardless of the results, should be seen as a warning sign about the future of stability in Iraq.

The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq said 2021 has not seen any improvements regarding journalist freedoms in the country

​An Iraqi group advocating for the freedom of journalists said in its report for this year that the country remains dangerous for those working in the press, especially in the northern Kurdistan region.
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In a report published on its website under the title "No Cities are Safe for Journalists," the The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq (PFAA) recorded at least 233 cases where journalists were attacked across the country.

It said the current year "did not differ from previous years in recording high numbers of violations recorded against the freedom of journalism work in Iraq."