How Iran looted Iraq's wealth
Following a series of crises in the
aftermath of 2003, Iraq has been prone to Iranian interventions. Tehran has
been looting of the country's wealth pro-Iranian militias have smuggled Iraqi
crude oil.
Iran has snatched billions of
dollars of Iraqi oil with the help of political party leaders and militias,
according to Iraqi reports. These
pro-Iranian parties and militias, especially the Popular Mobilization Forces,
have smuggled crude oil from Basra to Iran.
Iraqi reports say that the Popular
Mobilization Forces and a number of companies and organizations have graft and
corruption in Iraq following in the footsteps of the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards.
The Popular Mobilization Forces created some self-financing resources through the looting of Iraq’s wealth, selling off plots of land to citizens and other crimes.
The looting of Iraqi wealth has angered Iraq’s politicians, who revealed the funding of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah as well as other militias in Iraq and Syria from the Iraqi state budget.
A number of Iraqi observers and politicians said that billions of dollars from Iraq’s state budget fund Iran’s wars of Iran in the region.
Iraqi political analyst Abd al-Jabouri told THE REFERENCE that Nouri al-Maliki’s two tenures were a golden opportunity for Iran, citing that Iran got around $800 billion from Iraq’s central bank. “Haider al-Abadi said his government was bankrupted as it had only $65 billion,” al-Jabouri said.
“US leaks pointed out that al-Maliki sent these funds to Iran to finance Tehran’s wars in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon,” he said, adding that Iran funded militias which were trained in Iranian camps immediately after the occupation of Iraq.
