Corruption Serpents in Iraqi Kurdistan

Written by Arkan Radeef / Translated by Shermeen Yousif

Today, Masrour Barzani, the youthful dictator, arrives in public to announce that the regional administration owes $27 million, although according to reports, this amount is insignificant in comparison to the fortune owned by the Barzani and Talabani families! Despite this, they are requesting that individuals clench their stomachs and live on a fourth of their current earnings and wages. They claim that they are unable to secure the paychecks of the region’s workers, yet you believe, based on reports, that the two corrupt ruling parties own billions of dollars, with the monies coming from the people’s food. They are currently asking Kurdish citizens to clench their stomachs while they, their families, and their entourage live the lives of kings and pharaohs. In the construction of mansions and enormous buildings, models of vehicles and helicopters, private resorts, and orgy lives, they are astonishingly imaginative. Many women, on the other hand, are unable to provide milk for their infants. Families of those killed in the long conflicts against the Baath dictatorship, as well as those killed in the chemical and Anfal operations, can’t even get dry bread.

The enormous masses of workers on whose shoulders society’s wheels of production turn, let alone deprive them of the most fundamental rights and services, have been unable to secure the cost of medications and medical treatments, let alone the means to keep warm. The two corrupt parties have incurred debts for future generations and have transformed all of the people’s rights into money, which they have put in special accounts in the world’s banks.

Each member of the Talabani family totally controls the political landscape in Sulaymaniyah, as well as the Barzani family in Erbil and Dohuk. However, certain tiny anti-party parties have attempted to eliminate the hegemony of the two parties, but their efforts have largely failed. Masrour Barzani, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s corrupt Prime Minister, announced on May 22, 2020 that the territory owes $27 billion. The question now is whether or not the KRG is truly bankrupt. Is the regional government entirely reliant on 17% of the overall budget? Is the regional government unable to pay staff salaries due to a lack of funds? In this essay, I’d want to examine all types of imports into the Kurdistan area as well as expose some corruption and theft files involving the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

The Kurdistan region of Iraq has more than 200 legal and illegal refineries, and in Erbil alone there are 65 out of 124 illegal refineries, according to the iKurd website. According to the interrogation that was conducted by Representative Alia Nassif and Representative Huda Sajjad with the Iraqi Oil Minister, Thamer Al-Ghadhban, the production capacity of the Kurdistan Region is 450 thousand to 600 thousand barrels of crude oil per day. In July 2019, the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company announced that Taqa Atrush BP, in “Taqa Iraq,” set a new record in its production from the Atrush oil field in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and the total monthly production volume of oil exceeded one million barrels. According to the report of the Integrity Commission in Iraq, consisting of 538 papers, No. 8848, dated December 31, 2019, the amount of oil that was sold by the Kurdistan Regional Government without the knowledge of the central government in Baghdad amounts to 128 billion dollars. whereas, since 2003 until now, no imports of crude oil have been delivered to the federal government in Baghdad. And the oil-for-salary agreement, concluded between the federal government and the regional government, provides for the sending of oil revenues of 250 thousand barrels per day in exchange for the continued payment of salaries to the employees of the Kurdistan region by the federal government in Baghdad. So, the Baghdad government sent the salaries of the Kurdistan region’s employees to Baghdad, but the region’s government did not send any sums from the region’s oil revenues to the federal government. But the question is, where do these oil revenues go in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, knowing that the region consists of only three governorates, namely Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Dohuk?

According to media sources, the representatives of the Kurdish opposition “Change” movement in the region have handed over to officials and representatives in the parliament of the federal government in Baghdad information about oil, which is smuggled out of the region through Turkey and Iran, and its quantity, and the people involved in it, as well as the smuggling operations in tanks to Turkish and Iranian mafias and networks. Many of them are close to the Democratic Party led by the dictator Massoud Barzani and the Kurdistan Union Party, specifically the wing of Talabani in Sulaymaniyah. Representative Sarwa Abdul Wahed, who was a member of the Kurdistan Regional Parliament, says that most of the representatives in the Kurdistan Parliament did not and will not know how much and where the Kurdistan region’s oil exports were going. The deputy added that all the oil contracts were going to the Kar Company of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Qaiwan Company of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. According to reports, officials from both governments, as well as militias that control many oil fields in Iraq, are involved in smuggling it abroad in order to benefit from its revenues for personal and partisan reasons.

In one of the television interviews with Representative Ala Talabani, she says that on July 14, 2014, forces from the Kurdistan Democratic Party seized three major oil wells (Avana, Bai Hassan field) in the Dibis area of Kirkuk, and that these wells represent 70% of Kirkuk’s oil production. The representative adds that after seizing the wells, the forces handed them over to the KDP-affiliated Kar Company. In addition to their control over the extraction of oil from an oil field between Kirkuk and the town of Koysanjak, they also control wells in the “Baba Karkar” oil field and fields southeast of Erbil in which Emirati oil companies, most notably Dana Gas, invest.

According to information issued by an Iraqi official, the region was only exporting from Kirkuk, about 550 thousand barrels per day, from Kirkuk through Erbil to the ports of Mersin and Ceyhan, and then shipped to some Mediterranean countries.

The number of official border crossings in the Kurdistan region is 5, and the informal border crossings are 4, in addition to 20 unofficial crossings with Syria and Iran. And that the revenues from border entrances, taxes, fees, and customs tariffs amount to 10 billion dollars annually, and that none of these amounts have been delivered to the Baghdad government since 2003. In addition to the revenues from communications and transportation, which generate millions of dollars, knowing that the Kurdistan region contains three telecommunications companies and has not yet delivered any of these amounts to the federal government. In addition to imports from the natural gas trade, control over commercial projects, road and bridge projects, tourism projects, construction and reconstruction, health and service projects, etc., is monopolized by companies affiliated with the two ruling parties.

This is in addition to the illegal transfer of millions of dollars of oil revenues without being included in the public treasury in Baghdad by the Minister of Finance and a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the thief Fouad Hussein, in collusion with the criminal Adel Abdul-Mahdi, to the Kurdistan region of Iraq, or rather to the pockets of Barzaniya and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, knowing that the regional government has not handed over the region’s oil revenues that were agreed upon with the federal government in Baghdad since 2003. After all this money, Masrour Barzani, Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, appears on May 22, 2020, and announces that the region owes $27 billion, indicating that part of this debt rests with the federal government.

The Saudi newspaper “Al-Watan” stated in a report that international monitoring bodies concerned with monitoring the movement of funds and their movement confirmed that the volume of funds of corrupt political leaders in Iraq amounted to more than two hundred billion dollars in the form of liquid funds, real estate and investments in Arab and foreign countries. It was also revealed that the personal wealth of the former President of the Kurdistan Region, Massoud Barzani, amounted to 48 billion dollars, noting that it consisted of bonds, real estate, and bets in Swiss, German, Italian, UAE, Cyprus, and United Kingdom companies. In October 2017, the Turkish newspaper, Yeni afak, estimated the illegal wealth of Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, at $55 billion. It is important to note that the latter accumulated his wealth illegally and quoting a former official in the regional government as saying, “The value of the wealth owned by Barzani, which he accumulated through illegal activities, is estimated at 55 billion dollars, and that Barzani collected his wealth with his sons, brothers, and relatives in illegal ways.” The Barzani family owns $372 billion, while a journalist in Belgium notes that about 87 percent of families in the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq receive less than $700 a month, according to the United Nations Fund. to the population.

According to Shaswar Abdul Wahed, head of the New Generation Bloc, there are four companies affiliated with the two ruling parties in the Kurdistan region alone that own $32 billion, which is enough to cover the salaries of employees in the Kurdistan region of Iraq for a period of five years. He also added that the two ruling parties are stealing $120 million in revenue from imports and from border entrances and airports. The American “Real Deal” website revealed a “secret” bilateral deal for the two sons of Kurdistan Democratic Party Chairman “Masoud Barzani” that resulted in the purchase of two mansions worth $47 million in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. A few years ago, the Qatari Business and Trade magazine revealed that Mansour Barzani had lost 3 million and 200 thousand dollars in one night in Dubai gambling.

The sources also mentioned that his eldest son, Masrour al-Barzani, has surpassed his brother Mansour in his squandering of public money, whether in Switzerland or America. Masrour Barzani bought a villa in Washington with a value of ten million dollars. On April 22, 2020, a new scandal emerged regarding the Barzani family, which is the smuggling of one billion dollars to a bank in Lebanon in cooperation with Teddy and Raymond Rahma, owners of the Lebanese company ZR ENERGY.

As for the family of the deceased Jalal Talabani, including Jalal Talabani’s wife, Hero Ibrahim, her sons Bafel and Qubad, and their relatives, along with other leaders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan such as Kosrat Rasul and his sons, observers and politicians accuse them of amassing huge fortunes from the oil trade in the areas of Kirkuk and other sources in Sulaymaniyah. Jalal Talabani’s fortune amounts to more than 16 billion dollars; his wife, Hero, has a fortune of 9 billion dollars; and Qubad Talabani’s wealth is estimated at 7 billion dollars.

In the past few months, both the Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk governorates in the Kurdistan region of Iraq witnessed protest demonstrations by the teaching staff and employees to demand the payment of their suspended salaries since the beginning of 2020 and the termination of the salary savings system. The criminal Asayish forces of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Kurdistan Union Party used force to break up the demonstrations in which hundreds participated in Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk to demand the payment of teachers’ salaries. One person was killed in Sulaymaniyah, dozens were wounded, and about 200 demonstrators were arrested, according to statements by politicians and parliamentarians in the Kurdistan region. Kurdistan employees have been suffering from a delay in disbursing their financial dues for many months, as dozens of employees from various segments of the Sulaymaniyah Governorate left on May 7, 2020.

Demonstrations to protest the poor economic situation and the delay in the payment of their salaries. On February 22, 2020, hundreds of Kurds also demonstrated in Sulaymaniyah, the second largest city in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, against the corrupt dictatorial government of Barzani, due to widespread corruption and poor basic services in Kurdistan. The demonstrations come at a time when Baghdad and the southern provinces have been witnessing a protest movement since last October against corruption and the ruling political class in the country in order to get rid of all kinds of rampant corruption in the country and to have a free and prosperous life.