Mideast: One Month Into Iraq’s Anti-Corruption Crackdown, Entrenched Systems Are Rattled
Chickenonline
One month into Iraq’s intense crackdown on governmental corruption and only a few months into his term as president, Nizar Amidi has managed to bring blows to a system of corruption some feared, and still fear, was too prevalent to be affected. Launching an intense campaign of raids to root out corruption and recover assets in late June, that which had historically fallen through the cracks of accountability has been shoved back into the spotlight: tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of pounds of gold have been recovered from secret fortunes, scores have been arrested, and scrutiny of parliament representatives to those working in contracting and agriculture have dug deep into different levels of administration. Now, as this anti-corruption crackdown expands and arrested officials await their trial, the Iraqi people and world powers are eager to see whether this momentum can carry the country out of the stalled state of corruption it has been in since the US invasion in 2003.
The deep-rooted corruption that Iraq has been plagued with for over two decades would not exist without the perfect storm for systemic governmental corruption created by the US after the invasion. With an utter disregard for the consequences their actions would impart on Iraqi people and governance, the US succeeded in the fundamental destruction of preexisting Iraqi administrative infrastructure through military orders; overnight, these orders forced out roughly 400,000 military personnel overnight and removed Ba’ath Party members from all positions in public education, ministries, and administration, leaving a massive power vacuum where they would have been in civil service, ministries, and law enforcement, along with a gaping hole in institutional memory and experience.
The positions did not remain vacant long. They were subsequently filled with untrained loyalists, opportunists, and factions that had less interest in administration than they did in the accumulation of power. Original military personnel were absorbed into militant groups that would contribute to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a violent extremist militant faction. US decisions then divided the government into ethnic factions along Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish lines, entrenching a system of governance where ministries are treated as financial cash cows for political parties, their funding and positions being used for personal gain by the parties themselves with little to no accountability.
The final nail in the coffin, so to speak, was the cash that followed. With a critical, even devastating, lack of oversight, the United States brought billions upon billions of cash US dollars into the country for “reconstruction.” The vast majority of this money would never be used for its specified purpose; instead, it would trade hands in duffle bags, disappearing with no record to trace where it had gone or what it had ultimately been used to fund — careless and casual, and ultimately setting the standard in the new Iraqi government that administrative funds could be used for personal and illegal means with little backlash.
With this massive flow of untraceable, unaccountable cash coming into the nation, it stoked the flames of corruption into a bonfire, providing the means for local warlords, militias, and corrupted officials whose hands this money easily ended up in to work against stable governance. To make a critical situation even more severe, simultaneously, earnings that should’ve been going back into the Iraqi economy from massive oil reserves were stolen and smuggled out of the country en masse. One estimate from former President Barham Salih put just the amount of oil money stolen and smuggled out of the country between 2003 and 2021 at roughly 150 billion dollars.
As a result, between 2003 and 2023, Iraq consistently ranked as one of the world’s most corrupted nations on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. For the nearly half of the population that was born following the 2003 invasion, roughly 23 million Iraqis, they have only ever known their sectarian government as being debilitatingly corrupt on every level of administration.
Past efforts to root out corruption had proven inadequate in the face of the scope of the issue despite officials posturing as though they are deeply impactful, leaving citizens highly skeptical of any real progress.
The current crackdown underway by President Nizar Amidi, however, is considered by analysts and legal experts, along with state media, to be unprecedented in both scale and immediate impact. Coming on the back of the investigation into former Deputy Oil Minister for Refining Affairs Adnan al-Jumaili and the intelligence gathered therein, in late June Counter-Terrorism Service units flooded the Green Zone in Baghdad and arrested or detained dozens of individuals, including prominent parliamentary members and politicians from various sides of the administrative sects.
The focus has not solely been on cash; Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has also spearheaded the removal of all unauthorized weapons from the various militias at play in the country, enforcing a deadline in the final days of June for the complete removal of such weapons by the end of September. In a move not seen before, several powerful parties and coalitions made serious commitments to the plans.
Throughout the first few weeks of July, immense amounts of recovered cash were publicized by the government as the raids were expanded into the northern provinces, bringing the corruption crackdown beyond the major cities and raking in further hidden funds; 836 pounds (375 kilograms) of gold alone was recovered.
By Monday, July 27, state media had confirmed the total recoveries stemming from the investigation into al-Jumaili as surpassing $125 million in cash from stashes found in walls, orchards, farms, tunnels, drainage pipes and other hiding places. As of Tuesday, July 28, a secondary investigation has been announced by the Iraqi Federal Board of Supreme Audit that will be tracking roughly $77 billion in unpaid state loans that have been distributed to officials and public entities going back as far as 2004. It appears that thousands of these cases will be or are currently being referred directly to the Integrity Commission for prosecution.
While these raids and arrests have dug deep into various levels of governance, there is still a sentiment amongst the public that the arrests should go further and pursue even bigger fish. As the crackdown and investigations continue, the eyes of both the Iraqi people and the wider world will be watching to see whether such an undertaking can do more than just rattle the system and, instead, uproot it.
