Ignorance, disease, and poverty are three scourges that destroy civilizations and peoples. You cannot find it together in one place and it is at its highest level except in the country of loss, where the one who enters it is missing and the one who escapes it is born, the poet Maarouf Al-Rusafi says:
I see the future of days as being more aligned with the aspirations of those who strive to prevail.
And they lived as masters in every land, and we lived in our country as slaves.
If ignorance loomed in a country where you saw lions being transformed into monkeys.
This is what happened in the jungle of Iraq, where their nature and their souls were transformed, so the living became dead, and those who corrupted the earth and did not reform became masters and leaders of reform. They kindled the fire of sectarianism and harvested in its light the souls of the people and threw them into their sadistic incinerators. Yesterday’s ignorant are the scholars of today. Yesterday’s killers are today’s leaders in Iraq’s parliament, ministries, and in all Iraqi government joints. The shadow of Muqtada Al-Sadr and his oppressive hand, Hakim Al-zamili, remained on the poor Iraqis’ chests beneath the dome of Parliament, the country’s highest authority. Al-Zamili is a hybrid between the Baathists of the past, the Sadrist movement of the post-2003 era, and the deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament. He served as an officer during the Baathist regime. It’s ironic that his interests coincide with those of Muqtada al-Sadr, one of the proponents of the de-Baathification law. Their objectives are comparable, and their interests overlap. They don’t want to get rid of the Baath, but they do want to get rid of the people’s roots and destroy them. Following the end of the war in 2003, Al-Zamili worked as an information officer at the headquarters of the Free Iraqi Gathering Party, founded by well-known businessman Abdul Mohsen Shalash. He then collaborated with a group of terrorists to launch an attack on the party’s headquarters. These group assault on Shalash, kidnapping him and extorting his family to take the ransom, then throwing him after breaking his limbs in the Army Canal area in Baghdad. His brother Walid Al-Zamili, who is close to the leaders of the Sadrist movement, helped him get the job of Director of Administrative Affairs in the Ministry of Health. This job was part of the sectarian and ethnic quotas that the Sadrist movement got. From here, Al-Zamili was promoted to the position of Deputy Minister of Health for Administrative and Financial Affairs because of Muqtada al-Sadr’s support for him and his good relationship with the Minister of Health, Dr. Ali Al-Shammari. Al-Zamili was important to Muqtada Al-Sadr and gained his trust, so al-Sadr tasked him with transferring funds to Al-office Sadr’s and the rest of the Mahdi Army’s offices and financing them through the Ministry of Health’s treasury, in addition to the kidnappings and extortion operations that they were skilled at carrying out against their opponents and Iraqis. From here, Al-Zamili began to concentrate on a base for terrorism in the Ministry of Health, and it became a base for financing the Mahdi Army and its operations and a cover to hide under. Ambulances were used to kidnap and kill people, and forensic medicine halls and mortuaries were used to kill, torture, and get rid of people without being caught or questioned. As the head of the assassination squads, Al-Zamili started by eliminating and murdering professors and medical professionals, as well as any Sunni patients who were confined to hospitals. He did this by gathering information and lists of names and addresses of persons connected to the ministry of Health He was spending on the Mahdi Army members and rewarding them from the Ministry of Health treasury, and he appointed snipers from Al-Mahdi Army on the roof of the ministry building to kill any suspect. The matter was not limited to the Iraqis, but it went beyond that to the kidnapping of foreigners working in Iraq. One of the most famous operations carried out by Al-Zamili in coordination with Dhia Al-Nuri Al-Asadi (he is a Sadrist and was the security official of the Ministry of Transport and who became the head of the Liberal bloc in Parliament) was the kidnapping of four South African citizens working for a security services company in the Al-Shaab area of Baghdad on 10/12/2006 and then demanding a ransom for the purpose of their release. On October 30, 2006, a joint force of Iraqi and U.S. troops raided his house for inspection and then arrested him; however, Al-Zamili was later released, and the procedures for his trial were halted through a deal reached between Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Muqtada Al-Sadr. Al-Zamili kidnapped Dr. Ali Al-Mahdawi, the candidate of the Accordance Front for the position of Deputy Minister of Health. Al-Mahdawi disappeared with some of his bodyguards, including his brother, after entering the ministry building, and he has not been found to this day. He was also accused of kidnapping another Shiite Dawa Party Deputy Health Minister, Ammar Al-Saffar, in November 2006, who had allegedly compiled a dossier of his crimes to hand over to the Prime Minister. Al-Zamili was bargaining with the families of the kidnapped, and after receiving the ransom money, most of them would be killed, and their bodies would be sold to their families or traded. On February 9, 2007, he was arrested, and he confessed to the Minister of Health immediately after his arrest. He provided the names of 61 death squad leaders in Baghdad, Najaf, and Samawah to American investigators. He admitted to using ambulances to transport weapons and wanted Mahdi Army members, as well as transporting kidnapped people to Baghdad’s Khalaf Al-Sada neighborhood to kill them. On February 9, 2007, Al-Zamili was arrested by U.S. troops. He confessed immediately after his arrest to the Minister of Health. He gave American investigators the names of 61 death squad leaders in Baghdad, Najaf, and Samawah. He confessed to using ambulances to transport weapons and wanted members of the Al-Mahdi Army and transporting the kidnapped to the Khalaf Al-Sada area in Baghdad to kill them there. Al-Maliki, the prime minister, said he agreed to send Al-Zamili and Al-Shammari to court. Leaders of the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement have stated that they will support Al-Zamili while questioning the validity of the accusations, because if an in-depth investigation is conducted with him, the files of Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army will be fully revealed. In 2009, the Iraqi Criminal Court announced the release of Hakim Al-Zamili and the former Undersecretary of the Ministry of Health, Al-Shammari, and dropped all charges against them after two years of detention. When the judge was later asked about the reality of the innocence, his response was, “The one who killed hundreds of people will not care if he adds my family members to them, and you all know that all the witnesses who refused to go to court were all threatened.”
After that, Al-Zamili was appointed to the position of Chairman of the Security and Defense Committee in the House of Representatives between 2014 and 2018, and from here a new chapter of the corrupt terrorism agenda began. One of the most well-known corrupted deals occurred when Defense Minister Khaled Al-Obaidi assigned Lieutenant-General Hadi Azab, Director of Contracts in the Ministry of Defense, to work with Hakim Al-Zamili and his brother to finalize arms deal with a Georgian company, but it was later revealed that the company from which the arms were purchased was a fictitious company. The business was run from a hotel room in an African country. The Iraqi Central Bank’s treasury gave the company hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for this fake deal. Today, you see Al-Zamili running the Iraqi parliament in the capacity of deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament. He is now the final ruler in parliament, and he is in control of the decisions there, knowing that the speaker of parliament, Muhammad Al-Halbousi, is just a game in the hands of Al-Sadr and Al-Zamili, and that Al-Halbousi accepted this role only to keep his position in parliament. Under the dome of Parliament, Al-Zamili begins to form the dome of corruption and terrorism. Through this dome, Al-Zamili and Al-Sadr began to stretch out their arms, which, as soon as the rottenness of corruption erupted from them. Hakim Al-Zamili recruited Waleed Al-Zamili, Shaker Al-Zamili, and other brothers. He hired them to be his poisonous nails, tearing the flesh of Iraqis. The irony is that Al-Zamili and Al-Sadr are the first to lament and slap over the wrongdoing of the failed reform. Al-Zamili and Al-Sadr, who are playing the roles of the leaders of the movement against corruption, want the people who are causing trouble to be held responsible and punished. Sometimes they want a travel ban, and other times they want an interrogation of the corrupted officials in the House of Representatives, along with threats and criticism. However, Al-Zamili and Al-Sadr are making an effort to ignore that aspect of the corrupted system. They were in charge of seven ministries’ corruption. Iraq’s health-care system has deteriorated. Hospitals are riddled with rats and insects, and their services are in disrepair. Within two weeks, four hospitals had been burned, and the water had become contaminated. This is on top of the lack of electricity and services that people can no longer imagine. Roads, infrastructure, airports, and airplanes are all in disrepair. Every day, a new corrupt file appears, and what is hidden is greater. Corruption has corroded the Sadrist ministries to their core, so the Sadrists have bid farewell to the reformists. What happens if Al-Zamili and Muqtada Al-Sadr become prime ministers?