Iraqi political life may seem like a gang war to strangers, but most of the day its turbulent surface hides a calm and joyous looting business. In each government ministry, the highest loot is allocated by unwritten agreement to one faction or another. Sadrists have the Ministry of Health, the Badr Organization has long had the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Oil belongs to Al-Hikma. Newcomers sometimes have trouble adjusting to this state of affairs. A former cabinet minister, a technocrat who spent decades abroad, discovered, upon arrival, that his ministry was procuring vaccines with a $ 92 million contract. He found another way to buy the same vaccines for less than $ 15 million. “Once I did this, I faced great resistance, a fierce campaign against me,” he told me. His priority was to address the gap between Iraq’s oil wealth and its devastated health system, which lacks access to many basic medicines. For his opponents, the only imperative was his own interests and those of his party. The minister finally decided that these two philosophies were irreconcilable, and resigned. (Like most of the people I spoke to for this article, he spoke on the condition that he not use his name. Corruption is the third rail of Iraqi politics: touching it can easily kill you or your family members.)
The political leaders who preside over this graft are well known; some are strong American allies. The Barzani and Talabani families of Kurdistan have used their control over contracts in that region and its central bank to become immensely wealthy. Maliki and his ring of powerful cronies still hang over the Iraqi political scene. Moktada al-Sadr, the mercurial Shiite cleric, is another godfather figure whose followers are known for demanding heavy bribes. This system should have been shaken in 2014, when its depredations led directly to the takeover of the country by ISIS. Instead, the main consequence was the emergence of a new breed of parasites: the militias that helped defeat ISIS, collectively known as Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Popular Mobilization Forces. Hashd is a loose confederation of armed groups, some of which have existed for decades. In 2016, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi recognized them as part of the country’s security sector, and they now receive regular salaries just like soldiers and police officers.
Among the most powerful is Kataib Hezbollah. He was accused of launching an attack on an Iraqi air base in December that killed a US contractor and led to the murder of Suleimani, his last patron, a week later. Despite his high profile, he is surrounded by mystery. “We know next to nothing about leadership,” says Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Near East Policy Institute who has followed the group since its founding. “It is like the Freemasons. You can be in it and be in another movement at the same time. “He has built an economic empire, in part by forcing his way into legitimate business and government contracts.
Among the militia’s least known and most troubling companies is its gradual assertion of control over Baghdad airport. It started several years ago, when Kataib Hezbollah and another Iranian-backed militia called Asaib Ahl al-Haq began stealthily locating loyal workers throughout the airport, according to a senior airport official I spoke to. They were also able to get G4S, a British company that has a long-term airport security contract, to hire its people, he said. (G4S did not respond to requests for comment.) As a result, the two militias now have access to all of the airport’s CCTV cameras and a limited access highway called Kilometer One that connects the runways to the airport perimeter, bypassing security barriers. , the official told me. (When Qassim Suleimani and his entourage were hit by a US drone in January, they had just left this road.) Militia efforts became more aggressive about a year ago, the official told me, when their members occupied the director of the Baghdad airport. civil aviation at gunpoint and forced him to hire a man loyal to them as his nominal deputy. In late October, a front company in Kataib Hezbollah received a 12-year contract at the airports of Baghdad and Basra, worth tens of millions of dollars a year, despite the fact that the company, the Gulf corporation called Gently, it was only two months old and lacked the necessary accreditation or license, and its founder had been banned from the airport. Since then the contract has ended, but the company that took over the Hussein Laqees VIP terminal and hotel still stands.
Baghdad airport is just one of the cheap gateways that militias now control. They have used the ISIS threat to settle on most of the country’s land borders. And militias have dominated much of the trade through southern Iraq’s seaports for more than a decade. Indeed, militias operate a shadow state, charging importers higher fees in exchange for expedited processing and delivery. They have economic committees with offices in Baghdad, where private companies can make deals that blatantly sidestep the country’s legal channels. “For example, if I bring 100 cars from Dubai, if I go through the legal process, it could take two months to clear,” the airport official told me. “If I pay Kataib Hezbollah, say, $ 10,000 to $ 15,000, it could take just two days.”
The cash that has fueled Iraq’s decline The kleptocracy originates, for the most part, from a heavily guarded Federal Reserve complex in East Rutherford, NJ.There, every month or so, a truck is loaded with more than 10 tons of US currency wrapped in plastic, a path from $ 1 billion to $ 2 billion. The money is then taken to an Air Force base and transferred to Baghdad. It belongs to the Iraqi government, which directs the profits from its oil sales through an account with the New York Federal Reserve. This unusual arrangement is a legacy of the American occupation, when the United States directly controlled the Iraqi government and its finances. It has stayed in place because it fits both sides: Iraqis get fast, preferential access to dollars, and the United States retains tremendous influence over Iraq’s economy. Apparently, periodic dollar shipments (a small part of the country’s total oil revenue) must meet the needs of Iraqi exchange houses and importers, which require hard cash. In practice, many of the dollars have come into the hands of money launderers, terrorist groups and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, thanks to a little-known ritual run by the central bank of Iraq: the “dollar auction.”
