​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.  ​

‘What happens in Iraq, stays in Iraq.’

Unaddressed claims of misconduct by Oxfam staff weren’t confined to the Democratic Republic of Congo, five whistleblowers have told The New Humanitarian, revealing that complaints also piled up in Iraq before 12 workers finally filed a joint grievance last year.

The Iraq claims, coming hot on the heels of misconduct allegations in Congo earlier this month, point to persistent and enduring questions around the transparency of Oxfam’s dealings with its staff, the whistleblowers said.

The revelations also raise questions about the extent to which Oxfam made changes after its 2010 sexual exploitation scandal in Haiti: The Charity Commission for England and Wales called for a 100-point action plan a year after the Haiti scandal was uncovered in 2018, noting bullying and a “failure to consistently hold people to account for poor behaviour”. 

While U.S. presidents and secretaries of state fill their planes to Baghdad with aides and journalists, foreign leaders fill theirs with businessmen.

​Seventeen years ago the road from Abu Ghraib through Fallujah to Ramadi was among the most dangerous real estate in Iraq. On Feb. 12, 2004, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy transporting John Abizaid, then-commander of U.S. Central Command, and Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, in Fallujah. Later that month, insurgents attacked three police stations simultaneously and freed close to one hundred prisoners. By March 2004, insurgents were cementing control over Fallujah.

Attacks on U.S. and allied Iraqi forces became a near-daily occurrence both in the city, in nearby Habbaniyah, and in the provincial capital Ramadi. On March 31, 2004, insurgents ambushed a Blackwater convoy, set their bodies ablaze, dragged their corpses through the streets, and hung their charred remains from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. One week later, U.S. forces besieged the city. Twenty-four days later, U.S. Marine General James Conway lifted the siege and transferred power to the so-called Fallujah Brigade. It did not work. During the siege, there were five bombings; in the weeks that followed, there were thirty.

​By the end of the year, the U.S. military was back. Fallujah was leveled. “It was like Hiroshima” one resident explained to me over tea yesterday. Tragedy was not over. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shi’ite, systematically discriminated against the governorate between 2006 and 2014. The Islamic State insurgency took control of the province and terrorized local residents. As that group fell, locals skirmished with Iranian-backed militiamen. Eating lamb and rice at a communal lunch yesterday, a tribal sheikh told me simply, “We lived through hell.” 

Iraq’s Iranian-backed militias, self-styled as al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya (“the Islamic Resistance”), are no strangers to legal violations. Muqawama affiliates frequently target and kill journalists and protesters, and militia-run “secret” prisons have become a concern for activists, human rights groups, and the United Nations. The militias have also engaged in a years-long missile and rocket campaign targeting the U.S.-led coalition forces operating in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government, killing and wounding both coalition soldiers and local civilians.

More recently, Muqawama affiliates have taken to bombing civilian trucks driven by Iraqi civilians but purportedly carrying supplies and materiel to coalition bases. Not merely violent, the militias also derive income from a host of illicit sources and business activities, while their growing control of elements of Iraq’s government and institutions allows them to exploit the proceeds of checkpoints, border controls, and racketeering ventures. In short, the Muqawama militias have little respect for Iraqi domestic law, regulations governing Iraq’s armed forces and government employees, or any international law.

This criminality makes the militias’ obsession with the law all the more surprising. Yet the Iran-backed militias – many of them U.S.-designated terrorist organizations – expend considerable time and effort broadcasting their interest in law and their role as its defenders.

​Policymakers seeking long-term solutions to problems posed by the Muqawama must understand quasi-legalism in order to disrupt their activities and support the Iraqi government’s attempts to meet its international obligation to prevent violations by actors affiliated with the state.

Iraqi Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, yesterday held "greedy traders" responsible for the rise in commodity prices in Iraq.

"The increase in commodity prices is mostly linked to the greed of some traders," Al- Kadhimi said during a cabinet meeting, explaining that the government is planning campaigns to prevent price manipulation.

Al-Kadhimi added that he had instructed the Ministry of Trade to continuously work to provide more foodstuffs as part of the ration card.

"Following up on the issues and needs of citizens and easing bureaucratic procedures is one of our priorities, and all ministers should make more efforts to meet these needs," he said.

Earlier, the Iraqi prime minister instructed the Ministry of Interior and the National Security Agency to take the necessary measures to prevent tampering with the citizens' livelihoods.




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