UK Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said the UK was joining the global call for a worldwide ceasefire to military action as the planet works to combat COVID-19. One week later the British military conducted airstrikes in Iraq.

The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) has accused the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) of attempting to use the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak to 'hide from scrutiny' after it was recently revealed that British airstrikes were conducted in Iraq while the Prime Minister was in hospital. 
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Symon Hill, Campaigns Manager of the PPU, explained why these revelations concern him and his network of anti-militarists and pacifist. The airstrikes, which were announced on the MoD website on 25 April 2020, were actually conducted one week after the UK's Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said that his government was backing the calls for a global ceasefire amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Betrayed by pro-Iranian players, nominee says he rejects pressures to derail cabinet formation

​Iraq’s prime minister-designate has indicated for the first time serious difficulties in forming a cabinet, saying political pressure he has come under is damaging to the national interest.

Mustafa Al Kadhimi, a former intelligence chief supported by the United States, urged “everyone to put the interest of Iraq above everything else”.

He said in a tweet late on Monday he would only acknowledge forces who “support the course of the state”.

The comments are Mr Al Kadhimi’s clearest response yet to the delays he is encountering ahead of a May 9 deadline to secure a vote of confidence from parliament.

The country has another new prime minister nominee—but no new hopes of success.

​Raise your hand if you were aware that there was a new Iraqi prime minister-designate. No, not the guy who was nominated in mid-March or the guy before him. The new, new one. For those keeping score at home (which at this point is almost no one): On April 9, Iraqi President Barham Salih tapped Mustafa al-Kadhimi to be the country’s next prime minister.

​The incumbent, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, resigned in late November but continues to lead a caretaker government. The man initially chosen to succeed him, Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, could not form a government and then came Adnan al-Zurfi, who was also unable to garner enough support to form a government, resulting in Kadhimi’s nomination.

America’s newspapers of record in turn published what now seem to be perfunctory articles about the maybe new Iraqi prime minister that read a lot like so many previous articles about all the other Iraqi prime minister-designates dating back to the invasion of Iraq. Like his predecessors, Kadhimi apparently can balance between the United States and Iran and is a person of integrity who can elicit political support from different factions.

But such testimonials, in typical fashion, are followed by caveats about the significant shortcomings of Iraq’s political system that will likely make it difficult for the prime minister-designate to form a government and subsequently govern. The articles generally close with a fingers-crossed quality. It is a formula that journalists in the field and their editors at home seem to have perfected.

The United States has renewed a waiver for Iraq to continue importing Iranian gas for its dilapidated power grids, a State Department official said on Sunday, but this time for a shorter period of 30 days.

"The Secretary granted this brief extension of the waiver to allow time for the formation of a credible government," a State Department official said, referring to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and added that the waiver would expire on May 26.

Washington has repeatedly extended the exemption for Baghdad to use crucial Iranian energy supplies for its power grid, for periods of 45, 90 or 120 days.

Iraq relies on gas and electricity imports from Tehran to supply about a third of its power grid, crippled by years of conflict and poor maintenance.

And U.S.-Iranian Tensions Only Make Matters Worse

​I​n early April, a video of an elderly woman in what looks to be a makeshift isolation ward in Iraq circulated widely on WhatsApp, shared by Iraqi doctors and journalists alarmed by their country’s apparent inability to contain the novel coronavirus outbreak. The woman, who is dressed in a blue hospital gown, struggles to breathe, but there is no oxygen mask over her face and no doctor nearby. Instead, another woman prays over her while a third bangs at the door, desperate for help that doesn’t appear to arrive. 

Other reports coming out of Iraq paint a picture of an overwhelmed health-care system. Worried about impending shortages of personal protective equipment, doctors are reusing N95 masks. The country has just 1.4 hospital beds and 0.8 physicians per 1,000 people—less than half the levels in some nearby countries. The Iraqi government claims there are only about 1,500 COVID-19 cases countrywide, but the actual number may be far higher—Iraq hasn’t tested at large scale. Nor does it have the surveillance capacity for rigorous contact tracing and monitoring. One physician at a Baghdad hospital told me that he and his colleagues are seeing 50 new COVID-19 cases a day—and it is getting worse. “We are not prepared,” he said.

Decades of war have wrecked the country’s health infrastructure and made it particularly vulnerable to the disease. Two years after the defeat of the Islamic State (or ISIS), 1.5 million people are still internally displaced, without regular access to basic sanitation let alone health care. Most workers make a living in the informal sector, meaning that they now face a stark choice: continue working and risk infection or stop and risk starvation.

Increasing Concern Under Covid-19 Measures

​The death on April 18 of a 20-year-old woman in Najaf, possibly at the hands of her husband, should act as a wake-up call for Iraqi legislators to pass a law against domestic violence, Human Rights Watch said today. Iraqi authorities should investigate and prosecute domestic violence, and ensure appropriate sentences for violence against women.

“Domestic violence has always plagued Iraq,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “We see case upon case of women and girls dying at the hands of their families, Iraq's lawmakers have not done enough to save those lives.”

On April 12, a video surfaced on social media of the woman in a hospital with severe burn wounds. Her mother told Human Rights Watch that eight months ago her daughter married a police officer who had only allowed her to visit her parents once since then. On April 8, her mother said, the husband called to tell her that his wife had a “slight burn accident” and was in the hospital.

The mother could hear her daughter screaming. She rushed to the hospital, where the husband’s mother blocked her from seeing her daughter. Police took the young woman’s statement while her mother was blocked from the room, the mother said. On April 11, when she was able to enter the hospital room, her daughter told her that her husband had beaten her so badly on April 8 that she poured gasoline on herself and warned him that unless he stopped, she would light herself on fire.

In a city with few skyscrapers, the Baghdad Tower stands tall on the desert horizon. Ascend to one of its balconies, and on a clear day you’ll see the Ferris wheel in the Zawra amusement park and the perimeter-bound lawns of the Green Zone.

But the tower is derelict. There’s no one taking sunset selfies on those balconies. The elevator to reach the building’s 672-foot height never runs. Unlit chandeliers gather dust in a revolving rooftop restaurant that doesn’t revolve.
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Instead, like the city over which it presides — once cosmopolitan, now shattered — the tower’s story suggests a forever limbo, a concrete beige monument to hubris suspended between the exigencies of war and the corruption it breeds. That’s to say nothing of the country’s newest threat: a coronavirus outbreak that has forced Iraqis into hiding.

He who expects the upcoming Iraqi elections to be fair, or even half fair, must be not only delusional, but also naive or willingly duped.

​The suggestion to ​​hold early elections in Iraq was initially meant by the ruling clique as nothing more than a ploy to assuage the anger of demonstrators. But it seems that early elections ended up becoming a crucial and fateful necessity for both US and Iranian camps in Iraq. Both sides have found themselves forced to coexist in the country. Now everybody is just waiting to see what the post-pandemic winds are going to bring.

Iran is waiting for the fall of US President Donald Trump and the coming of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to help it rise from its depression, while America is waiting for the Iranian regime to fall in due time because of the sanctions, the coronavirus pandemic and the prospect of a new Iranian Revolution. Just place your faith in God to do his deeds.

As for us – simple Iraqis who are despised by both camps – we too have been waiting, since October of last year, for the revolution of our brave and honourable young patriots to turn the tables on the two camps and return the country to its rightful owners, free of the weapons of the armed gangs, corrupt proxies and despicable traitors.

Like all of us, Iraqis are bracing for the full impacts of the coronavirus. But in early March, protesters at a rally in central Baghdad began a chant asking for the virus to come to their country to root out the corruption and foreign influence that have sparked popular protests stretching back to October.

"Listen to us corona: come and visit the thieves who stole our wealth, come and take revenge on those who stole our dreams, we only love our homeland but [the authorities] kill us," they chanted.

For nearly six months, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have turned out in the streets in a pro-sovereignty movement that has shaken the country’s political establishment.

Throughout the protests, Iraqi demonstrators have been clear, for Iraq to progress as a nation, it must start by looking critically at the destructive impacts of corruption. According to a government investigation, the Iraqi state has lost over $450 billion to embezzlement, fake contracts and overblown salaries since 2003. A key driver of this corruption—and a principal target of the protesters—has been the influence of Iranian leaders on Iraq.

Its official refusal to aid the U.S. in invading Iraq masked Canada’s actual participation.

​In the wake of 9/11, Americans were introduced to some of the uglier features of their government at war. On the one hand, we were witness to the petty politics of competing bureaucracies—small-minded battles over information that ultimately led to failures of security and bungled missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, we became subject to the repressive character of secrecy regimes that defend Constitutional violations in the name of preserving the very principles—such as transparency—that bolster a democratic society. But according to new embassy cables published this week by WikiLeaks, the United States isn’t alone. Our neighbors to the north, it seems, have had their own problems with sharing information—amongst themselves and with the public.

During the chaotic period immediately following the American invasion of Iraq, the Canadian government was stuck scratching its chin over what to do with Mamdouh Mustafa, the sole Iraqi diplomat remaining in Ottawa. The Canadians had already kicked a handful of Iraqi diplos out of the country on suspicion of espionage by then, but Mustafa had been allowed to remain, even if kept under close watch.

In a cable dashed off roughly a month after the initial stages of the US invasion, the American embassy in Ottawa reported that the Canadians continued “to monitor closely the activities of…Mustafa, and had no indication that he was destroying Iraqi Government records or property.” The leadership in Ottawa was particularly keen, it would seem, to get inside of the embassy once Mustafa left the country so they could “remove items of an ‘undiplomatic nature’ from the premises of the Iraqi Embassy,” though what those items may have been is left a mystery.