​Assassinations of two activists in less than a week seen as targeted

Iraqi activists in the southern city of Basra have been targeted in a string of killings and attempted assassinations, with two young organisers gunned down in less than a week.

Rogue militia groups are widely suspected by analysts and activists of being responsible. The killings threaten to undermine new Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who has pledged to rein in militias acting outside state control and to protect protesters who have been demanding reforms over the past year.

After Mr Kadhimi took office in May, the authorities arrested a small group suspected of being responsible for assaults on protesters in Basra. A month later, security forces detained members of one of the most prominent Iran-backed militias. But the men were subsequently released. And in July, Hisham al-Hashemi, a close adviser to the prime minister, was shot dead in Baghdad in an incident which many suspected to be retaliation. 

An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

PART I
​A GLOBAL THREAT EMERGES
How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
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The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

What was once an autocracy has become a kleptocracy, a 'giant graft scheme' with protesters ever in the streets.

​Last week, the New York Times published one of its finest pieces of reporting this year. Written by Robert F. Worth, it’s an autopsy of post-Saddam Iraq, where the autocracy of the Baathist regime has given way to a kleptocracy in which “literally everything is for sale.” Worth depicts an Iraq that’s essentially a giant graft scheme, with elites cashing out while everyone else scrounges for scraps. Construction projects meant to create new community spaces or just fix up the local mosque sit half-finished, their funding either stolen or bottled up in disputes. Thuggish militias threaten violence to land lucrative contracts and establish monopolies.

All of this is made possible, naturally, by Uncle Sam. Every month, the Federal Reserve of New York, where the Iraqi government has an account, ships hefty sums of dollars to Baghdad. This cash is then ostensibly auctioned off to Iraqi banks, which are supposed to then lend it out. Instead the auction acts as a banquet for thieves and fraudsters, who have even created fake banks in order to launder money. And the corruption isn’t just limited to the financial system. The root of the problem is Iraq’s parliament, which, after every election, allows the winning parties to divvy up an ever-expanding number of civil service jobs. This is the linchpin of the graft: powerful positions are filled with cronies who then enable contract corruption and kickbacks, greased by pilfered dollars and enforced by militias.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi is set to visit Washington soon, although he does not yet have a date or an invitation, so he is scrambling to say all the right things in order to secure a meeting with US President Donald Trump.

Iraq is worse off than it was two weeks ago and this last week has propelled two items to the top of the list for Al-Kadhimi’s visit to the US: Kata’ib Hezbollah’s continued attacks on the US and Iraqis, and calls by Al-Kadhimi for early elections that Kata’ib Hezbollah and its allies in Iraq’s Council of Representatives won’t allow to happen. 

The top agenda item for Trump is for Al-Kadhimi to do something about the militias that he supposedly commands as Iraq’s commander in chief. The militias that fall under the government’s security apparatus are attacking US personnel in Iraq, which are there to partner with the Baghdad government to ensure the enduring defeat of Daesh. The militias have now become more of a threat to the US and Iraqis than Daesh.
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Trump wants to know if the US has a partner in Iraq. The president is willing to pull US forces out of Iraq if this “partner” continues to disappoint. Republicans and Democrats are looking for a reason to end this experiment. And it won’t be without costs to Baghdad and Tehran.

Mustafa Al-Kahdimi has vowed to win back respect to Iraq’s troubled state, but daunting challenges lie ahead

​Since he took office in May, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi has been invoking Iraq’s fractured national sovereignty as a major impediment to the country’s recovery and progress towards peace and prosperity.

Al-Kadhimi’s vision for sovereignty seems to mean something precise: without restoring the state’s authority it will be impossible to end the quagmire into which the country’s human and other resources are being constantly poured.

The issue of Iraq’s sovereignty, or rather lack of it, has been debated since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it has become starker and more urgent over recent years in view of the country’s internal and external challenges.

The combination of foreign interventions, cross-border terrorism, rising Iran-sponsored militias and transnational corruption offers sophisticated and well-reasoned arguments why Iraq has been in such disarray.

With the country facing multiple crises, Mustafa al-Kadhimi will  have a much harder time winning a mandate to rule.

​When Mustafa al-Kadhimi became Iraq’s prime minister on May 7, after five months of political deadlock in Baghdad, I argued his best chance of success was to fail fast. The only way to clean the Augean stables of Iraqi politics was with the strong broom of a popular mandate — and that could only be obtained from elections. Thoroughgoing political and economic reforms would require a majority — or at least a plurality with which to build an irresistible coalition — in parliament.

Last week, the prime minister called for early elections — on June 6, 2021, a year ahead of schedule. But Iraq’s circumstances have deteriorated so much in the three months since he took office, Kadhimi will have a much harder time convincing Iraqis to give him a mandate to rule.

All the crises he inherited have deepened. The coronavirus pandemic, already alarming when Kadhimi was sworn in, has since only grown more frightening, forcing him to announce fresh lockdowns. The Iraqi economy, having suffered extensive collateral damage from the Saudi-Russian oil war, has weakened. Powerful, Iran-backed Shiite militias have grown more brazen. Corruption, already ingrained in the body politic, seems to have metastasized across every aspect of the state.

​​A probe into the deaths will do little to reassure a restive nation, says demonstrator

Iraqi security forces stand guard outside the entrance of the Green Zone during a protest in the capital Baghdad in July ( AFP/Getty )The Iraqi authorities have admitted 560 people have been killed since October in anti-government rallies, as the country’s interior minister said police officers shot protesters using personal hunting rifles.

Iraq has been rocked by months of nationwide protests as thousands of Iraqi youth have taken to the streets to decry rampant corruption, poor services and unemployment. Security forces have used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse crowds killing and maiming thousands.

On Thursday, Hisham Dawood, a political advisor to the country’s new prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, announced that hundreds had died in the clashes without going into detail.

He said the government will form a fact-finding committee to determine the circumstances of the deaths, adding that the authorities regard “all victims of the protests as martyrs”. Rights groups have, however, cast doubt on how effective such a body would be.

Robert Draper, a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a contributor to National Geographic, is the author of the new book "To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq." Draper in 2008 published another book about Bush, "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush," which covered the first six years of his presidency. 

In a phone interview with Business Insider Columnist Anthony L. Fisher, Draper talked about why he felt the time was right to revisit the greatest foreign policy catastrophe of modern times, Donald Rumsfeld's micro-managing megalomania, and who in the administration will Colin Powell never forgive. 
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stephen Whiteley, Unaoil’s former territory manager for Iraq, has today become the second Unaoil executive to be sentenced for paying over $500,000 in bribes to secure a $55m contract to supply offshore mooring buoys. He was sentenced by HHJ Beddoe to 3 years’ imprisonment.

This follows the sentencing of his co-conspirator Ziad Akle on 23 July 2020, another former Iraq territory manager for Unaoil, upon whom HHJ Beddoe imposed a sentence of five years’ imprisonment.

The two men conspired with others to pay considerable bribes to public officials at the South Oil Company to secure contracts for Unaoil and its clients to construct offshore mooring buoys in the Persian Gulf. The new buoys formed part of a series of state-run projects designed by the government of post-occupation Iraq to boost its economy by rebuilding the country’s oil industry and thereby expanding its oil export capacity.
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A jury at Southwark Crown Court found Stephen Whiteley guilty on one count of conspiracy to give corrupt payments. In the same trial, his co-conspirator, Ziad Akle, was found guilty on two counts of conspiracy to give corrupt payments.

Early last October, while working in his office in Baghdad, a businessman named Hussein Laqees got a phone call from a number he’d never seen before. “We need to talk,” the caller said. The man’s voice was gruff and self-assured, a little menacing. He demanded that Laqees come meet him but refused to give his name.

Laqees demurred, and the call ended. He might have forgotten the whole exchange had a colleague not been in touch a few minutes later with worrisome news. The mystery caller, he said, was from Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Iraqi militia with strong ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They had a business proposal to discuss.

When the militiaman called again, Laqees reluctantly agreed to a meeting. He gathered a few colleagues, and they all drove to a house off Sadoun Street in downtown Baghdad, arriving near dusk. Inside, he was led into a dim office and introduced to a small, bald man who got right to the point. “You need to work with us, there is no other choice,” the bald man said. “You can keep your staff, but you must do as we say.” He explained that Kataib Hezbollah would take 20 percent of Laqees’s gross revenue — about 50 percent of his profits.

​Laqees refused. His company, Palm Jet, had a five-year government contract to run a V.I.P. terminal at Baghdad’s international airport, along with a nearby hotel; it also works routinely with Western aeronautics firms like Lockheed Martin. He could not have any dealings with a group like Kataib Hezbollah, which is listed by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization (as is the unrelated Lebanese group also called Hezbollah). The bald man replied that if Laqees refused, he would seize everything he owned in Baghdad. Laqees looked at him in disbelief. “I’m an investor,” he said. “There is law.” The bald man shot back: “We are the law.” He told Laqees to give him an answer by noon the next day.