More than 200 former Iraqi high-ranking military officers are being detained in government prisons in southern and central Iraq. Most were taken as prisoners of war (POW) by the US in 2003 and 2004 after the invasion or were taken as POWs during the battles between the Iraqi army and US forces in the course of the invasion. The US handed over these Iraqi officers to the Iraqi government in 2010 before its final troop withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011. They received varied sentences, from life imprisonment to the death penalty, issued by unfair US sponsored Iraqi trials.

Most of these prisoners were senior officers including brigadier generals or had higher ranks in the Iraqi army. Some of them were pilots, members of the special forces,  the Republican Guard, navy,  infantry, the missile unit, or were experts and scientists in Iraq's former Military Industrialisation Organisation.

The prisoners are currently being held in al Hout Prison in southern Iraq, al Kadhimiya Prison in Baghdad or in two other prisons in Babil and Basra provinces. They are being held under high level  security measures, despite their old age with may suffering from serious health problems.
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Last week, the chief of staff of the Iraqi army and the commander of former Republican Guard, Eyad Khalifa Ftaih al Rawi, 76, died in prison after he had had a stroke. His daughters and sons were not allowed to see him before he died.

Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court has rejected a request to cancel the country's recent parliamentary election results over allegations of voting irregularities.

This comes after to an absence of a quorum led the Iraqi Council of Representatives to fail on Sunday for the third time to hold a scheduled meeting to pressure the Electoral Commission to reverse the results of the recent elections.

The current Iraqi parliament continues to press the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) for a recount by manually counting the electronic votes after allegations of voting irregularities after a government committee proved that the voting apparatus used in the elections was not fail proof.
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Even as only a few weeks are left for the current term of the Iraqi Parliament, controversy still surrounds Iraq’s political outcome following the parliamentary vote.

MOSUL, Iraq, May 22 (Xinhua) -- Up to 1,000 bodies were retrieved under the debris of devastated buildings in western Mosul in Iraq over the past several days, a police source said Tuesday.

"Only on Monday and Tuesday, a team from the Iraqi civil defense police retrieved 150 decomposed corpses. Some of them were of women and children," Lieut. Col. Rabie Ibrahim, head of the team, told Xinhua.

The bodies were said to be of Islamic State (IS) militants, their family members or the civilians prevented by IS militants from leaving homes during the fierce battles and heavy bombardment of the city, Ibrahim said.
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The campaign to retrieve the bodies was ordered 10 days ago by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, also the commander-in-chief of Iraqi forces, who formed a committee from the civil defense and Nineveh's provincial police to clear the devastated areas in the old city center of western Mosul for bodies.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Kuwait Energy, an independent oil and gas company, has hired investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners (PWP) to advise it on options that could include selling all or part of its Block 9 asset in southern Iraq and a spin-off of Egyptian assets, sources familiar with the matter said.

​The move is aimed at creating much-needed liquidity for the company’s shareholders and a cash buffer to repay its debt, the sources said.

Kuwait Energy and Perella Weinberg declined to comment.

The move comes after Kuwait Energy ended discussions on a possible merger with London-listed SOCO International earlier this year, saying the parties had not reached “mutually acceptable transaction terms”.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions on Iran’s central bank governor, Valiollah Seif, and Iraq-based Al-Bilad Islamic Bank for “moving millions of dollars” for Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, as Washington seeks to cut off funding for what it says is Iran’s malign activities in the Middle East.

​U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Seif covertly funneled millions of dollars on behalf of the IRGC through Al-Bilad bank “to enrich and support the violent and radical agenda of Hezbollah.”

The United States classifies Lebanon’s Shi’ite Muslim movement Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, as a terrorist group.

“It is appalling, but not surprising, that Iran’s senior-most banking official would conspire with the IRGC-QF to facilitate funding of terror groups like Hezbollah, and it undermines any credibility he could claim in protecting the integrity of the institution as a central bank governor,” Mnuchin said in a statement.

Any British soldier who served during Britain's campaign in Iraq would probably like to forget the name Moqtada al-Sadr. A Shia cleric turned warlord, he was public enemy No 1 during our five-year occupation of Basra, the hand behind countless IED ambushes, mortar attacks and vicious anti-British riots. 

A decade on, one might expect Iraq's new democracy to have served due process on such a man – if not for killing British troops, then for the countless Iraqis killed by his sectarian death squads. 

Instead, far from being on the run or behind bars, he is now Iraq's most powerful politician, after emerging on Monday as the shock victor in last weekend's Iraqi elections. 
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Having reinvented himself as a pacifist, non-sectarian moderate – his Mehdi army units have been rebranded as "peace brigades" – his political bloc triumphed unexpectedly over that of prime minister Haider al-Abadi, the favourite to win.

Mosul, the capital city of Nineveh province, with an original population of more than 2.5 million, was the biggest prize claimed by Islamic State (IS) in its expansionist campaign across northern and western Iraq in 2014.

More recently the Iraqi government declared the city of Mosul liberated from the IS control in July 2017, which was a turning point in the U.S.-backed Iraqi military campaign against the group. The battle, which stretched nine months, was marked by fierce combat and heavy U.S. bombardment.

However, the fight in Mosul saw heavy civilian-casualty as conflict monitors struggled to keep pace with the volume of U.S.-led airstrikes and the frequent use of mortars and artillery that often landed indiscriminately among the city's trapped residents.
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More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake the city from IS, according to intelligence reports – a death toll far higher than previous estimates. Residents of the besieged city were not only killed by U.S.-led airstrikes and IS fighters but also by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants.  Amnesty International called the number of civilian deaths in the battle to oust IS from west Mosul a “catastrophe” in a report published in July 2017.

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - When Iraqi merchant Jabar Mohamed was growing up in the southern port city of Basra, he liked to watch boats gliding along a canal lined with palm trees and ancient buildings near his home.

Once dubbed the “Venice of the Middle East” for its network of canals resembling the Italian city, Basra was a magnet for Middle Eastern tourists until the early 1980s.

Today the cherished canal of Mohamed’s youth is a reeking, refuse-filled cesspool forcing passersby to cover their mouths.

It is a showcase for the virtual absence of public services in a country plagued by turmoil, corruption and decay since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

More and more Iraqi voters seem to be planning to boycott the polling booths on Saturday. Because of election rules, even if ten voters turn up, the results still count.

It is just a few days before the Iraqi elections and there is a major campaign underway on Iraqi social media. But this is no election campaign. The most popular hashtags include ones that say things like: I’m not voting, boycott the elections, or stay at home. Hundreds of Iraqis changed their Facebook pictures to a logo that said, “I will not vote”.

Those who support the boycott had plenty of arguments to offer. They reminded voters about the lack of change after past elections and the laws that regulate how parties get into parliament that, boycotters say, unfairly exclude smaller parties and help to maintain the status quo.

The movement has been so noticeable that Iraqi politicians have been forced to respond. Senior Sunni Muslim politician, Salim al-Jibouri, said the elections presented a historic opportunity to put Iraq on another path after so many crises, and asked voters not to boycott the polls.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal has cast a shadow over an already fraught election in Iraq, where Tehran and Washington have vied for influence since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The removal of a Sunni dictatorship cleared the path for the country’s Shi’ite majority, from which the three top contenders for the premiership, including incumbent Haider al-Abadi, are drawn. The outcome of the May 12 ballot is too close to call. 

Whoever wins must balance Iraq’s interests - and the need to reduce the struggling economy’s dependence on oil - with those of the United States and Iran, whose intensifying rivalry makes that more difficult. 

Abadi and his main rivals - predecessor Nuri al-Maliki and new challenger Hadi al-Amiri, a hardline militia commander at the head of a powerful paramilitary coalition aligned with Iran - tilt heavily towards Tehran.