Iraq has been granted a 90-day extension to continue critical Iranian energy imports, following the expiration of the original 45-day waiver.

​The Trump administration has granted Iraq a new, 90-day exemption from sanctions targeting Iran, enabling Iraq to continue energy imports that account for about one-third of the country's electricity supply. 

When the sanctions first snapped back into effect, on Nov. 5, the U.S. granted a 45-day waiver, and that grace period has now been extended by another 90 days, according to multiple officials on both sides of the negotiations.

Several key questions remain unanswered, however, including why the extension was granted and what Iraq needs to do in order to earn future waivers.

The new round of US sanctions against Iran has put neighboring Iraq in a tough position. 

Baghdad heavily relies on Iranian electricity and natural gas imports to meet its energy needs. A forty-five-day sanctions waiver granted to Iraq by the Trump administration in early November is set to expire this week.

On November 11, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry attended a two-day conference in Iraq along with a trade delegation of over fifty US energy and security firms. During the visit, he urged Baghdad to wean itself off Tehran and pave the way for American investment in its energy sector. “The time has come for Iraq to break its dependence... on less reliable nations seeking domination and control,” Perry said.

Since the defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in late 2017, Baghdad has also been under US pressure to rein in, if not dismantle, Iran-backed armed Shia groups known as Paramilitary Mobilization Forces (PMF). Last year, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at a joint news conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir that Tehran-backed militias and their Iranian advisors who helped expel ISIS from Iraq needed to “go home.”

Fourteen unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed in 2007 shooting that drew scrutiny of role of US contractors in Iraq War.

​A former Blackwater security contractor has been convicted by a court in the United States of murder at his third trial in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq, an incident that drew worldwide condemnation.

Nicholas Slatten, 35, was on Wednesday found guilty of first-degree murder in Washington for his role in the shooting, which stood out for its brutality and sparked intense scrutiny of the role of US contractors in the Iraq War.

Prosecutors charged that Slatten was the first to open fire and intentionally set off a shooting rampage in the September 16, 2007 massacre that killed 14 Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Iraq's capital, Baghdad.

The number of slum dwellers is estimated at 3.3 million people living in 522,000 housing units.

​It has become obvious that corruption has settled in Iraq since its occupation in 2003. Corruption has multiplied and engulfed all aspects of life.

The emergence of slums in the land of Mesopotamia is but one of the manifestations of the disastrous consequences of occupation and the bottomless corruption of the successive administrations in Iraq. It joins phenomena such as hunger, unemployment and poverty to depict a depressing picture of what has befallen this venerable country.

It is a painful paradox that in the post-2003 period we find Iraqi citizens who have become homeless, living like wild animals in the open while historically Mesopotamia was the perfect haven for man.

Twenty-one prisoners, most of them members of Daesh jailed on terrorism charges, broke out of a prison in northern Iraq, Kurdish security officials said today. Fifteen were recaptured.

The fortified jail of Sosa is located near the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya and includes mainly militants of the hardline Islamist group who were captured during the fight against Daesh which started in 2014.

Kurdish security officials launched manhunt operations after the break-out late yesterday and 15 of the 21 were recaptured, two security officials said. The whereabouts of the other six remains unknown.
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Although Sosa jail is located in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, the federal government has full control over the prison.

At the close of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime.

But months of bombing of Iraq by US and British planes and cruise missiles has left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.

It took less than a decade for the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign to begin to coming into focus. And they are dire, indeed. Iraqi physicians call it “the white death”-leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation is compounded by Iraq’s forced isolations and the sadistic sanctions regime, recently described by UN secretary general Kofi Annan as “a humanitarian crisis”, that makes detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.
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“We have proof of traces of DU in samples taken for analysis and that is really bad for those who assert that cancer cases have grown for other reasons,” said Dr. Umid Mubarak, Iraq’s health minister.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has ramped up efforts to provide warm clothes and life-saving supplies to more than 150,000 displaced children across northern Iraq whose lives are threatened by freezing temperatures.

Many families in the region have been left with next to nothing after being on the move for years due to conflict and resulting economic hardship. It is “impossible” for them afford fuel for heating and winter clothes to keep their children warm, the UN agency warned.

Flash floods last month worsened the situation, said Peter Hawkins, the head of UNICEF operations in Iraq.

“The devastating floods have made this winter even more difficult for displaced children who are extremely vulnerable to hypothermia and respiratory diseases,” he said, underscoring that every child “deserves to be warm and healthy.”
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Upping its response, UNICEF is providing winter clothes, including boots, scarves, and hats to approximately 161,000 children in Sinjar, Erbil, Dohuk, Ninawa, Anbar, Diwaniya, Basra, Salaheddin, Baghdad and Suleimaniah, including through cash support.

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq needs at least two years to boost the country’s gas production to stop importing Iranian gas used to feed its power stations, a senior Iraqi energy official said on Thursday.

Hayan Abdul Ghani, head of state-run South Gas Co. (SGC), told reporters that Iraq’s gas output is expected to reach 1.3 million cubic feet per day by the end of 2020, an increase of 400 mcf/d from current levels.

“Iraq’s current production of gas is not enough to meet our power stations’ demand and therefore we are still importing gas from Iran. We need at least 24 months to operate new gas projects and start production,” he said.
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The United States said last month that Iraq can continue to import natural gas and energy supplies from Iran for a period of 45 days as long as Iraq does not pay Iran in U.S. dollars. Sanctions on Tehran’s oil sector took effect on Nov. 5.