Istanbul - Photos of stacks of hundred-dollar bills and discussions over whether the new government is truly serious about dealing with rampant corruption have dominated the Iraqi news over the past week.
Rewards announced for tips leading to the recovery of public funds have led to both praise from some and questions from others as to how this information will be used within a system few Iraqis trust. The country’s new prime minister - whose greatest asset, some say, may be the fact that he has no background in Iraqi politics - seems to be on a mission both to prove himself in the early days of his mandate and to increase public trust in the Iraqi government.
On 28 June, Operation Dawn began. Dozens of officials, including parliament members whose immunity had been lifted, were arrested in a massive operation centring on Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.
The Iraqi prime minister’s legal advisor said on 1 July that arrests and investigations were ongoing, that their trials would be public, and that the scale of theft by those detained was “beyond reason or logic”. Discrepancies in reports by the oil and finance ministries have long been reported and commented upon amid scepticism about the political will and ability to do anything about them.
The late May arrest of Adnan al-Jumaili, the former oil ministry’s deputy minister for refining affairs and former director general of the North Refineries Company and Beiji Refinery, was followed by a flurry of information about alleged networks involved in embezzling funds.
Photos were circulated of massive amounts of cash and other valuables allegedly found in his possession.
On 6 July, an investigative judge at the Central Anti-Corruption Criminal Court announced the seizure of 25 billion Iraqi dinars ($19 million) as well as one million US dollars and five kilograms of gold as part of the case against Jumaili and “his accomplices”.
The judge noted that this latest discovery had been hidden in plastic water bottles inside Jumaili’s home in Tikrit.
The former deputy minister was arrested shortly after 41-year-old Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, a millionaire businessman and youngest person to ever hold this position in Iraq, took office in May following months of political deadlock and wrangling. How far up will it go? No full official list has been issued of those arrested and on what charges. Some claim that most are either from the Sunni minority or close to the previous prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani .
“The current drive focuses on arresting the second tier - or third tier - of employees or government officials who are actually the tools or the ‘hands’ of the first tier,” an Iraqi government official, who requested anonymity to be able to speak freely, told The New Arab via encrypted messaging on 5 July.
This is “a lower level than it should be to be accepted by the wider public,” he added.
The official stressed that only by arresting “first-tier politicians” widely assumed to be corrupt will there be the chance to foster much-needed public trust in the government’s efforts and intentions. “So far that hasn’t happened.”
Essentially all Iraqi prime ministers, and especially those since the end of the 2014-2017 war against the Islamic State (IS), when the focus was on defeating that international terrorist organisation, have made pledges of a similar sort, commentators note. Corruption long a rallying call even among non-state actors Several non-state armed actors in Iraq also long claimed that they, too, are on a mission against the corrupt and to restore stolen property to its rightful owners.
Members of influential Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Saraya al-Salam said in 2017 that they had found “millions” in Iraqi dinars and gold buried, as inhabitants had long distrusted banks and their fellow Iraqis.
Members of the Shia armed faction said that they saw restoring the property to their rightful owners in the Sunni-majority city as a cornerstone of their security and trust-building efforts.
Over the past decade, fighters from factions linked to Iran but incorporated into official Iraqi government forces as part of the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) have also claimed that their fight is not only against terrorism but corruption.
They recognise how detrimental corruption is to a country in general. Fighters from the Kataib al-Imam Ali faction, in interviews conducted in 2019 in the border city of al-Qaim, for example, said that the Syrian government at that time was weak because it was “Baathist like Saddam’s regime and corrupt”.
As a result, they were not in contact with the regime itself and instead only with their “brothers in the Islamic resistance” across the border. Massive 2019 protests that brought down the Iraqi government at that time largely accused the entire Iraqi political class as well as armed factions of being corrupt.
The official security forces have, moreover, often said that corruption is as dangerous to the country as terrorism.
The then-head of the highly secretive interior ministry’s Falcons Cell Intelligence Unit, only known as Abu Ali Al-Basri at that time as his true identity could not be revealed for security reasons, said in a February 2020 interview that “terrorism generates corruption and corruption generates terrorism”. Red tape and a lack of journalistic protections Complicated paperwork and seemingly arbitrary permit requirements create fertile ground for unscrupulous individuals to exploit Iraqis through the low-level corruption they encounter in daily life.
High levels of bureaucracy breed corruption in Iraq and elsewhere, as numerous studies on different locations throughout the world have shown , creating the conditions for bribes to flourish.
A culture of perceiving local journalism as either adversarial or a public relations tool, and international journalism as either a form of tourism promotion or intelligence gathering, also negatively affects both societal trust and investor perceptions.
A UN study released in June found that, worldwide, “investigative journalism delivers strong returns. Every $1 spent on journalism can result in more than $100 in savings to the public through reclaimed funds, improved public services and reduced corruption”.
The report said that “news outlets can have a positive impact on the world simply by existing because elites behave better when they think they will be monitored”.
Journalism done in the public interest to hold those in power to account can “make countries more attractive to investors, because it is associated with lower costs of doing business, less risk in the banking sector, increased compliance with the rule of law, and lower information asymmetries”, it added.
Yet the fact that the first US journalist to have been taken hostage in over a decade worldwide was forced into a vehicle in central Baghdad on a street with a relatively heavy police presence, beaten to the point of having several bones broken, blindfolded, shackled, and held in captivity for over a week prior to being released in April shows there is work to be done on that front. Previous Iraqi PMs made similar pledges During his term in office between May 2020 and October 2022, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi had also pledged to remove weapons from the hands of non-state actors and to crack down on corruption. Attempts to do so, however, seem to have been thwarted by various armed and political factions. After leaving office, a rash of accusations - including related to alleged corruption - against him led to his fleeing the country temporarily. Kadhimi is now back in Iraq, with some people apologising for spreading unproven allegations against him.
When Sudani came into office, he also made similar pledges. However, Saad al-Khalidy, executive director of the Baghdad-based Iraqi Center for Negotiation Skills and Conflict Management, said in April 2023 that Sudani’s government - after six months in office - had made “no real efforts” to crack down on corruption, and that he doubted it would be able to “deal seriously” with the issue.
One of the obstacles has long been the need for support from powerful parts of Iraqi society that have enriched themselves over the years, in part through links to armed factions amid a country awash in weapons out of state hands.
As for Zaidi’s ability and willingness to substantially reduce corruption, the Iraqi government official The New Arab spoke to on 5 July said that “the reason for this bold change is the geopolitics,” in the region “after the war”, in reference to the US-Israel conflict with Iran.
“The aftermath [of the fighting] created the conditions for the arrests due to the fact that the protection that some of those people had has been removed, and the chief justice,” he said, in referring to Supreme Judicial Council chief Faiq Zaidan, “is in line with it.”
“The Americans have put a prerequisite,” he added, for any help getting “Iraq out of its problems,” he added, without specifying. But the subtext is the battle against corruption.
“It’s too early to say if it’s going to succeed,” he noted in reference to the anti-corruption efforts. “It just started and - in Iraq - things always start well, and then the momentum cannot be maintained.”
The Iraqi prime minister’s legal advisor Munir Haddad noted in statements on 1 July that the anti-corruption campaign would continue “with no red lines or time limits”, that over $2 trillion had been looted from Iraq since 2003, and that “investigations and raids are currently being carried out in complete secrecy to ensure that wanted individuals do not escape”.
In any case, the Iraqi government official who spoke to The New Arab said that it will need “a few years” of efforts before “substantial change” is seen. Shelly Kittleson is a journalist specialising in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Her work has been published in several international, US, and Italian media outlets. Follow her on X: @shellykittleson Edited by Charlie Hoyle