Iraq’s healthcare system is in crisis. There’s a shortage of drugs and the medical staff to administer them. Doctors are fleeing in their thousands. Patients are suffering.

​BASRA, Iraq - On the walls of Basra children’s cancer hospital hang photos of some of the youngsters who’ve been treated there. Most are smiling. Some of the portraits have a black stripe in the upper left corner. Those are pictures of children who passed away.  
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Hesham Abdullah says he quit his office job to care for his son Mostafa, 14, and sold his house and all the family’s valuables to pay for treatment. With no medical insurance, he estimates he has spent at least $120,000 on black market medicines and trips to overseas clinics. His family of five had to move in with his brother.

“It’s worth it. I’d sleep in the street in return for a pain-free moment for him,” said Abdullah. “But this is not something any individual can afford. This is something the state  should handle.”

SAMARA, Iraq — Fifty years ago, a much richer Iraqi government spent lavishly on health funding. The state company responsible for drug imports, known by its Arabic acronym KIMADIA, enjoyed such a close relationship with the world's top drug manufacturers that it would fax orders directly and shipments would arrive before a formal contract was drawn up.

In sharp contrast to the company's heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, today's KIMADIA does not have nearly enough money to cover Iraq's pharmaceutical needs.

In 2018, the state budget allocated $800 million for drugs. KIMADIA blew through it and accrued an additional $455 million in debt to pharmaceutical companies, in the end purchasing just 12% of the 535 drugs on its essential medicines list in large enough quantities to meet demand, said KIMADIA chief Mudhafar Abbas.
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The next year, in response to pleas by the health minister at the time, Alaa Alwan, for additional funds, the government increased KIMADIA's budget to $1.27 billion. But once the agency settled its debts, this left roughly the same amount of money as the previous year; $810 million.

This past week (Oct 2017), the Kelly family decided to unearth the corpse of their beloved family member and cremate his remains. In 2003, Dr. David Kelly, formerly a United Nations (UN) weapons inspector and member of the Ministry of Defence (UK), walked into the woods near his home, ate a couple dozen opiates, slit his left wrist, and died.

​That was the official cause of death, but conspiracy theorists believe Kelly was killed by members of his own government. Even now, after 14 years, many activists say an official coroner’s inquiry into his death should take place. But it’s what Kelly said, or was reported to have said, which some believe got him officially assassinated, and his death made to look like a suicide.

After 9/11/01, just as the United States needed Iraq to possess weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), so did the United Kingdom need the Middle Eastern county to possess them in an effort to get its people on board with a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation. Kelly was a chemical weapons experts employed by the United Nations to inspect Iraq’s chemical weapons programs.

In 2002, in an off the record interview with the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan, Kelly told reporters the dossier the UK Prime Minister Tony Blaire used to justify the invasion of Iraq was “sexed up” and that he had personally inspected the supposed mobile chemical weapons plants and stated they were nothing more than helium factories for filling balloons.

Iran’s network of influence in Iraq has taken a battering over the past two months. The loss of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, was a significant blow. Soleimani was an Arabic speaker with decades of experience operating in Iraq.

​But his killing came at a time when Iran’s go-to proxy in Iraq, Kata’ib Hezbollah also has been under unprecedented pressure. Its commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was killed with Soleimani in January and was viewed by Iran as its military governor in Iraq. His loss and Kata’ib Hezbollah’s partial suppression mean that Iran and its proxies need to recalibrate their strategy in Iraq, and there are indications that alternative militias may be stepping into the breach.

Kata’ib Hezbollah operates under the umbrella of the Hashd al-Sha’abi (Popular Mobilization Forces or PMF), a coalition of armed groups that formed or expanded in response to calls by Shi’ite religious and political leaders in 2014 to prevent ISIS from capturing Baghdad. Iranian “special groups” — militias formed with Iranian support to resist Saddam Hussein and/or the United States — were the principle beneficiaries of this call to arms. Though hugely successful in pushing back ISIS, these groups initially were illegal under the Iraqi Constitution. This changed with legislation passed in 2016 that incorporated the militias into the armed forces.

Muqtada al-Sadr is a populist Shia cleric, an arch survivor in Iraq’s permanent political crisis, and one of its most powerful leaders. He is criticised for being a senior member of the Iraqi ruling class while at the same time presenting himself as one of its most radical opponents. He has admitted that ministers from his movement have been among the very worst offenders in corrupt and dysfunctional governments that he has publicly denounced.

Yet his much-criticised ambivalence is typical of every Iraqi leader who has to manoeuvre between the multiple centres of power that dominate the political landscape. His career also helps explain why it is near impossible to radically reform the way Iraq is ruled, however unsatisfactory that may be.

Sadr’s balancing act has always been difficult and is now under severe strain, ever since marches, rallies and sit-ins demanding jobs, water, electricity and an end to corruption began to convulse Iraq in October last year. He and his supporters reinforced and protected protesters until January, but then became increasingly critical and hostile towards them. 
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Demonstrators are still being killed by security forces, but they are on the retreat. They have been forced to shift the central focus of their protests from Tahrir Square in the heart of Baghdad to Nasiriyah, an impoverished city in the far south of Iraq. Moreover, the government this week banned all public gatherings for fear of the coronavirus epidemic. The protest movement that once came close to turning into a general uprising looks, for the moment at least, as if it is being crushed. ​Sadr has been criticised for his change of stance, which may have proved a near fatal blow to the protests. “He changes his mind as often as he changes his shirt,” says Kamran Karadaghi, a former chief of staff to the Iraqi presidency. 

Iraqi protesters were wise enough not to take up arms and, by not doing so, they’ve taken the high moral ground.

​The corrupt regime in Iraq and its supporters are being financed by the country's oil revenues, while the Iraqi people struggle with poverty and unemployment. That is the unfair division of fortunes imposed by the power of the militias and that is why the question that will haunt each of the millions of victims who pay the price of this systematic plunder is: Why does the oil continue to flow?

Data shows that trillions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenues have been looted and siphoned since the US-led invasion of Iraq. In the meantime, Iraqi citizens have been denied access to clean water, electricity and health services. The country’s education system is in shambles and its infrastructure is collapsing.

There is no need to ask where all that money has gone because the answer is well known. So why does the oil continue to flow?

As Iraqis protest against the crimes that they and their children are exposed to every day, they know that the criminals they’re decrying are financing their crimes with the wealth that Iraqis and their children rightfully deserve. All know these funds did not come from the revenues of a foundering agriculture sector or from a dying industry or from honest trade. They come from oil sales and nothing else. Oil that is flowing in the veins of a corrupt regime. So why does oil continue to flow in those veins?

It’s been one month since the US assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, and, as the immediate danger of all-out war seems to have subsided, interest in the issue has waned. But the US-Iran rivalry has not abated, and the repercussions of the US’s strike continue to be felt on the ground by the revolutionary movement in Iraq.

Despite a week of sabre rattling and back-and-forth missile strikes, followed by President Trump and Iran publicly stating they had no desire to escalate further, the tensions between the US and Iran remain unresolved. The likelihood of more military strikes, proxy struggles over Iraq, and another escalation in the near future is still high. 

Trump has implemented more economic war on Iran in the form of sanctions. Already since Trump reinstated sanctions in 2018 the Iranian economy has fallen into a deep recession, oil exports have plummeted, and massive inflation has meant that the people affected most are the poor and working people of Iran who pay the human cost for Trump’s callousness. Human rights organisations report that the sanctions will create extensive hardships particularly for Iranians who require specialised medications and healthcare.
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The economic impact of the sanctions, exacerbated by the Iranian regime’s own austerity measures and disproportionate military spending on regional interventions, have pushed the Iranian people to revolt in mass numbers as recently as November 2019--only to be met by a brutal military crackdown, with security forces killing hundreds and arresting thousands. Iran’s regime thus attempted to take advantage of the aftermath of Soleimani’s assassination to drum up anti-US nationalism in order to distract from and excuse its own repression and unrest at home. The dramatic nationalistic processions remembering Soleimani exemplify this, although the shooting-down of a Ukrainian passenger jet at the beginning of January quickly rekindled mass anger directed towards the regime. Chants of “down with Khamenei” filled the streets, with protestors defacing portraits of Soleimani. This cycle of performative state nationalism followed by more repression and stifled revolt is certain to be repeated--and any US intervention will only worsen its effects on the Iranian people.

Sixteen years ago this week, the United States invaded Iraq. We went in on an unconvincing excuse, articulated by George W. Bush in a speech days before invasion:
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“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”

To the lie about the possession of WMDs, Bush added a few more: that Hussein “trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda.” Moreover, left unchecked, those Saddam-supplied terrorists could “kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”

The disaster that followed cost over a hundred-thousand lives just in Iraq and drained north of $2 trillion from the budget. Once we were in and the “most lethal weapons ever devised” were not discovered, it quickly became obvious that large numbers of people at the highest levels of society had either lied, screwed up, or both.

Musical chairs in the Iraqi parliament can no longer solve the country's problems.

​The United States faces an increasingly urgent set of first-order policy questions in Iraq. Spoiler alert: The answer is not Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, Iraq’s newly designated prime minister. A popular uprising might be.

Allawi’s recent nomination to be Iraq’s next leader is a dead end, for Iraq and the United States alike. He has no chance of resolving the two fundamental crises now plaguing the country: first, the collapse of legitimacy of Iraq’s post-2003 political class, and second, Iraq’s ever-expanding subjugation by Iran and its local Shiite Islamist proxies.

The United States would be well advised to keep its distance from Allawi’s candidacy and instead focus its energies on supporting the extraordinary protest movement that has upended Iraq’s politics since late last year, and whose demands for sovereignty, independence, and clean government represent the last best hope for salvaging not just Iraq, but the future of U.S.-Iraqi relations as well.

Fifty injured in attacks on rallies in Iraqi capital this week alone, according to the UN ​

​Armed factions are shooting hunting rifles loaded with birdshot at peaceful protesters in Baghdad, the United Nations has warned, and urged Iraqi authorities to hold those responsible for the violence to account.

Nearly 500 people have died since October after security forces and affiliated armed groups used deadly force at rallies that erupted across the country against endemic corruption and foreign interference – mainly by Iran and the US.

Last year Amnesty International said that police were firing live ammunition and military-grade teargas canisters – which can pierce skulls – into crowds, killing people.

The group verified several gruesome videos of teargas attacks filmed in Baghdad’s main protest point Tahrir Square.