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”.