BAGHDAD – As Iraqi officials work to assign blame for the deadly attacks on the heart of the government on Sunday, concern is rising that a greater security threat may come from within the system in the form of corruption, from the top leadership of ministries down to soldiers who man checkpoints.
“Let us expose the corrupt,” read an Iraqi government poster. An internal report focuses on rampant bribery in the ministries.
An Iraqi police checkpoint in Baghdad. Concern is rising that corruption is threatening security.
A recent internal report on corruption by the inspector general of the Interior Ministry specifically mentions the bribery of checkpoint guards: The blast on Sunday at the Justice Ministry, surrounded by checkpoints, killed nearly 160 people, while a similar attack in August on the Foreign and Finance Ministries killed at least 122. “These car bombs didn’t come from the sky!” said Judge Abdul Sattar al-Beiriqdar, spokesman for the Higher Judicial Council. “They must have been driven in streets until they reached their target.
If there were no corruption, the attackers wouldn’t risk passing through these checkpoints.” But the corruption runs much deeper, endangering the fragile sense of security in Iraq as America draws down its forces, with security services that seem aimed as much at enriching themselves as protecting average Iraqis, according to dozens of interviews with police officers and officials as well as the report by the Interior Ministry.“Corruption is a phenomenon that forms a real threat to the structure of the state,” Jawad Bolani, the interior minister, said in a recent interview. His ministry is Iraq’s second largest, employing one of every four Iraqis working in the public sector, which accounts for a vast majority of the jobs in Iraq.
The report details how corruption is carried out in his ministry, which he argues has still made great strides in curbing it. Money is skimmed off of salaries. Contracts are manipulated and fudged to wring personal profit. Ghost police officers are listed on payrolls so commanders can take the salaries, and other police officers are told they are fired even as commanders continue to take their pay. Criminals and insurgents are freed with a well-placed bribe, criminal records are expunged for payment, detainees are abused by guards in order to extort money from relatives.
Beyond the outright financial corruption, there is also political corruption, in which the parties vying for power here look to secure the loyalty of large chunks of the security apparatus, according to Iraqi and Western officials.Police officers corroborated much of what is in the report and gave other examples of the kind of corruption that threatens the stability of the security forces.“Our brigade commander steals $34,000 out of the $41,000 allocated monthly for the food,” said one police officer. “He replaced our battalion commander four times because they were not cooperating with him.”Another officer described how some people on the payroll never showed up for work but came only to get their pay, which they shared with their patron.“Every officer with the rank of a colonel or higher has at least 10 policemen from whom he takes all or part of their salaries,” said the officer. “We call those policemen ‘fadhaei,’ ” which translate roughly as aliens from outer space.
The corruption runs from the highest officials to the street corner police officer, according to senior investigators, but the report itself is careful not to name officials directly.Mr. Bolani defended his ministry’s efforts to cut down on corruption, progress that Western officials and other experts also recognize. He cited the elimination of death squads, which used to operate from within the ministry, as a “revolution.” Over the last two years roughly 62,000 employees who had criminal records were fired.
Despite the purge of the ministry, Aqeel al-Turaihi, the ministry’s inspector general, said there were thousands more people on the payroll with troubling backgrounds.In the first half of this year alone, inspectors have found $122 million in stolen funds, only a fraction of what corrupt officials have siphoned off from the immense bureaucracy, according to the report. Experts say there are parts of Iraq’s government that have shown slow improvement.
In the first six months of this year, 1,455 arrest warrants have been issued by the Iraqi Commission of Public Integrity, in charge of corruption prosecutions (though only 397 people have been convicted on corruption charges since the commission began its work in 2004 until the end of last year).Earlier this year, the minister of trade was forced to resign after a fraud scandal relating to the distribution of food.And this month, the deputy transportation minister was arrested after being caught trying to bilk a security firm for more than $100,000 in order to get a contract to provide security at Baghdad International Airport, according to Iraqi officials.
Corruption has long plagued Iraq but as Americans play less of a direct role in security operations, it is more of a threat than ever before, both Iraqi and American officials say.“The endemic corruption within the Iraqi system – not only the security forces, but the system – is still probably the biggest problem facing Iraq,” said Gen. Ray Odierno,ghd iv purple styler, the commander of American forces in Iraq, during a Saddam Hussein, was informed – through the local media, he said – that a judge on that court had issued an arrest warrant for him.“The judge said at first that the accusation against me was for ‘the extermination of the human race,’ ” he said. “It was changed,chi ceramic hair iron, and I am now accused of fraud.”
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