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Seyyed Hamid Hosseini said on Tuesdaythat Irans export of products to neighboring Iraq improved in the second Iranian month in the current year [from April 21 to May 19] as compared to a month earlier.

Accordingly, the countrys export of non-oil commodities, which had decreased due to the coronavirus pandemic, was compensated, he emphasized.

Turning to the latest situation of Irans export of non-oil goods to neighboring Iraq, Hosseini added, the latest statistics on foreign trade of the country indicate that export situation of the country in the second Iranian month in the current year has ameliorated as compared to its previous month.

Given the export situation, Iraq was placed at the second rank among other oil-exporting countries, Hosseini stressed.

He pointed to Iraqi borders shared with the Islamic Republic of Iran and added, Iraqis Arab borders with the Islamic Republic of Iran are reopening amid the pandemic by observing health protocols.

According to the latest data, 50 Iraqi trucks have entered Iran to load cargoes, kept at Irans Mehran Customs, to Iraq, he said, adding, with the coordination made, it is expected that 500 other trucks would enter into the country to transport other cargoes via Mehran Border to Iraqi land and territory.

Shalamcheh Border Crossing will be reopened soon as this border had been closed due to the outbreak of COVID-19.

With the coordination made, other Arab borders with the Islamic Republic of Iran will be reopened soon, Hosseini added.

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Irans export of products to Iraq ameliorated amid pandemic - Mehr News Agency - English Version

BAGHDAD The Islamic State is stepping up its attacks in Iraq, fulfilling the expectations of many analysts that the extremist group would mount a comeback after the Iraqi government declared victory over it in 2017.

While the Islamic State has yet to show the same capabilities it had at its peak in 2013 and 2014, when it gained control of several provinces and population centers including Mosul, one of Iraq's largest cities the tempo of attacks has been increasing for over six months. This coincides with a period of domestic unrest due to widespread anti-government protests.

The US-led coalition against the Islamic State has also reduced its aerial activities due to heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran following the US assassination of Iran's top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in January.

The Islamic State has been ramping up a campaign of violence in rural parts of Iraq since the second half of 2019, focusing on Diyala, Kirkuk and Salahaldin provinces, to the east and north of Baghdad. Both the frequency and character of the attacks have been steadily increasing, and there is data that suggests the Islamic State is moving skilled fighters to the area from Syria to stoke a new insurgency.

If true, this would be reminiscent of the group's buildup in 2012 and 2013. In April, the Islamic State staged 108 attacks in Iraq, including against an intelligence building in Kirkuk. A large assault targeted the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces on May 1 near the city of Samarra, showing that the Islamic State is willing to move beyond guerilla tactics and engage in coordinated and sustained fighting.

Iraqi security forces ride in vehicles travelling to Mosul to fight against militants of Islamic State at an Iraqi army base in Camp Taji in Baghdad, February 21, 2016. Ahmed Saad/Reuters

There are many reasons why the Islamic State has been able to increase its activity. First, it is deliberately targeting rural areas where the terrain is difficult to access and where the Iraqi security forces have a thin presence, which allows it to launch hit-and-run attacks without many losses. Fewer coalition air strikes and less drone surveillance have also given militants more freedom to move without fear.

With the recent protests in Iraq, the government has focused its security efforts on containing the unrest, which has reduced its bandwidth for dealing with the Islamic State. The ongoing failure of governance at the local level, which is one of the main drivers of the protests, has further sapped public confidence in Iraq's leaders, while persistently high unemployment has allowed the Islamic State to recruit desperate young men with offers of quick cash payments.

The Iraqi government's response to COVID-19, which has drawn resources away from countering the Islamic State to maintaining curfews and locking down large urban areas, has also allowed militants to move more freely in rural areas.

To make matters worse, the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq involves more than the Iraqi security forces. It also includes the state-sanctioned, mainly Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces and the Kurdish peshmerga. But the response to recent attacks has been hampered by a lack of effective coordination and leadership between all these groups, as well as friction between some fighters and local populations. Iraq's elite, US-trained counterterrorism forces have also suffered from poor leadership and the slow recovery from losses they sustained during the war against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017.

Despite all of these problems, there is some cause for optimism that Iraq will be able to meet the challenge of a resurgent Islamic State. After five months of political turmoil and two failed attempts, parliament approved a new government last month. The new prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, is a former intelligence chief who has promised to prioritize the campaign against the Islamic State and win back some trust from the Iraqi people.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi. Iraqi Parliament / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Al-Kadhimi will need to act quickly to quash the insurgency before it develops any further. Fortunately, the Islamic State is widely loathed by most of the Iraqi population. With new leadership in both the elite Counter Terrorism Service and the Interior Ministry, there is the potential for better intelligence gathering and more effective community policing.

Al-Kadhimi has sent signals, including through the arrest of militiamen in Basra accused of shooting at protesters, that he will tackle issues that have long plagued the Iraqi security sector, including corruption and weak accountability, and that paramilitary groups that threaten the rule of law will be brought to justice. Those steps will be vital for the state's ability to maintain control and avoid situations where local armed groups compete with state security forces and with one another.

Foreign governments and organizations are rightly concerned about the Islamic State's reemergence, and they have an important role in supporting Iraq. Most importantly, members of the US-led coalition should make a renewed push to dedicate resources solely to its core mission of degrading and defeating the Islamic State, avoiding tit-for-tat confrontations with pro-Iranian armed groups that tend to undermine relations with the Iraqi government.

Defusing tensions between the US and Iran will serve to improve Iraq's security in general, as it will give Iranian-backed paramilitary groups less incentive to attack US interests. American forces will also be less prone to using Iraq as an arena to push back against Iran. This is a message that coalition members should send to leaders in both Washington and Tehran.

Iraqi security forces patrol to enforce a curfew to help fight the spread of the coronavirus in central Baghdad, April 7, 2020. Associated Press

With the global downturn in oil prices amid the coronavirus pandemic putting Iraq under serious strain, foreign powers can provide economic assistance to prevent government collapse, contingent upon the new government undertaking vital reforms.

It is difficult to predict the trajectory of the Islamic State's activity. There are signs that the group will expand its capabilities in the coming weeks and months, while still falling short of being able to overrun large swaths of territory. A realistic assessment of the Islamic State's ability will be an important part of the response. Exaggerating its threat is unhelpful, but dismissing it and allowing a low-level rural insurgency to go on for months and years is dangerously short-sighted.

The government will also need to focus on the underlying causes and security gaps that allowed the Islamic State to regain strength in the first place.

It will undoubtedly be a challenge for Iraq's leadership to act quickly and decisively while spurring improvements in governance, but the country's leaders have been here before. With the benefit of hindsight and support from the international community, Iraq can avoid a repeat of the past.

Sajad Jiyad is a Baghdad-based political analyst and a visiting fellow with the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is the former managing director of the Al-Bayan Center, an Iraqi think tank.

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ISIS is making a comeback, and Iraq's government may not be able to handle it - Business Insider - Business Insider

Baghdad (AFP)

Seventeen years after US troops invaded their country and eight months since protests engulfed their cities, Iraqis are sending solidarity, warnings and advice to demonstrators across America.

Whether in Baghdad's Tahrir Square or on Twitter, Iraqis are closely watching the unprecedented street protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in Minneapolis as a police officer knelt on his neck.

"I think what the Americans are doing is brave and they should be angry, but rioting is not the solution," said Yassin Alaa, a scrawny 20-year-old camped out in Tahrir.

Only a few dozen Iraqis remain in tents in the capital's main protest square, which just months ago saw security forces fire tear gas and live bullets at demonstrators, who shot back with rocks or occasionally Molotov cocktails.

Violence left more than 550 people dead, but virtually no one has been held accountable -- mirroring a lack of accountability over deaths at the hands of security forces in the US, Iraqis say.

Now, they want to share their lessons learned.

"Don't set anything on fire. Stay away from that, because the police will treat you with force right from the beginning and might react unpredictably," Alaa told AFP.

And most importantly, he insisted, stick together.

"If blacks and whites were united and they threw racism away, the system can never stop them," he said.

- Common 'injustice' -

Across their country, Iraqis spotted parallels between the roots of America's protests and their own society.

"In the US it's a race war, while here it's a war of politics and religion," said Haider Kareem, 31, who protested often in Tahrir and whose family lives in the US.

"But the one thing we have in common is the injustice we both suffer from," he told AFP.

Iraq has its own history of racism, particularly against a minority of Afro-Iraqis in the south who trace their roots back to East Africa.

In 2013, leading Afro-Iraqi figure Jalal Thiyab was gunned down in the oil-rich city of Basra -- but discrimination against the community is otherwise mostly non-violent.

"Our racism is different than America's racism," said Ali Essam, a 34-year-old Afro-Iraqi who directed a wildly popular play about Iraq's protests last year.

"Here, we joke about dark skin but in America, being dark makes people think you're a threat," he told AFP.

Solidarity is spreading online, too, with Iraqis tweaking their own protest chants and slogans to fit the US.

In one video, an elderly Iraqi is seen reciting a "hosa" or rhythmic chant, used to rally people into the streets last year and now adapted to an American context.

"This is a vow, this a vow! Texas won't be quiet now," he bellowed, before advising Americans to keep their rallies independent of foreign interference -- mimicking a US government warning to Iraqis last year.

Others shared the hashtag "America Revolts."

Another Arabic hashtag going viral in Iraq translates as "We want to breathe, too", referring to Floyd's last words.

- 'Reminiscent of Baghdad' -

Not all the comparisons have been uplifting, however.

The governor of Minnesota, the state in which Minneapolis is located, said the US street violence "was reminiscent of Mogadishu or Baghdad".

And the troops briefly deployed by US President Donald Trump to quell unrest in Washington were from the 82nd Airborne -- which had just returned from duty in Iraq.

"Trump is using the American army against the American people," said Democrat presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden.

Iraqis have fought back online, tweeting "Stop associating Baghdad with turmoil," in response to comparisons with their homeland.

Others have used biting sarcasm.

In response to videos of crowds breaking into shops across US cities, Iraqis have dug up an infamous quote by ex-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Lawlessness and looting is a natural consequence of the transition from dictatorship to a free country," he said in response to a journalist's question on widespread looting and chaos in Baghdad following the 2003 US-led invasion.

2020 AFP

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'We want to breathe, too': solidarity from Iraq - FRANCE 24

First, threat inflation. In the Foreword to the dodgy dossier of September 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: Saddam Husseins military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. This turned out to be fake news but vital to rally the party, parliament and the nation behind the decision to go to war. In time the Imperial College London model of March 16, widely discredited already, may come to acquire a notoriety equivalent to Iraqs dodgy dossier. Similarly, Neil Fergusons claim of 5,10,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US will be judged the equivalent of Blairs 45 minutes to Saddams WMD. As of yesterday, the global death toll from Covid-19 was 3,88,416. Scaled up to todays population, the 1957/ 1968 Asian/ Hong Kong flu killed 3.0/ 2.2 million people.

Similarly, to gain public backing for the degree of state intrusion into peoples private lives and control over nations economic activities the immediacy, gravity and magnitude of the coronavirus threat had to be made apocalyptic. As Walter Scheidel reminds us, SARS-CoV-2 is not remotely as lethal as the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 that killed the fit and young as virulently as the elderly and infirm. It infected 500 million people and killed 50 million, equivalent to 220-250 million dead today. Yet authorities did not close down whole societies and economies in 1918. In other deadly pandemic episodes also we suffered but endured. To overcome these hesitations of history and experience, the threat from SARS-CoV-2 had to be inflated to beyond all previous calamities in order to panic countries into drastic action.

Second, very thin evidence. The infamous Downing Street Memo of July 23, 2002, noted that President George W Bush was determined to go to war and military action was seen as inevitable. But British officials did not believe it was legally justified, so the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. Similarly, instead of evidence-based policy, many governments have resorted to policy-based evidence to justify the lockdown. Third, the denigration of critics querying the evidence. Those who questioned the lack of evidence to invade Iraq were demonised as apologists for the Butcher of Baghdad. Those who ask for evidence to justify the biggest expansion of state power in Western political history are shamed as wanting to kill grandparents.

The fourth parallel is in the dismissal of collateral harm, as described last month, as exaggerated, speculative, without evidence, motivated etc. Yet evidence continues to mount that Yamraj has six different non-corona alleyways through which to claim his growing mass of victims during the lockdowns.

The fifth echo is theres no clear exit strategy. Instead of a quick victory in Iraq followed by consolidated democratic regimes in a stable region and an orderly withdrawal, the US found itself in a quagmire and eventually went back home an exhausted and vanquished conqueror. Almost all lockdown governments are now struggling with public justifications to declare victory and lift the lockdown. Modellers still want none of it and the apocalyptic warnings are back, despite mounting evidence of no spike in cases and deaths in countries and US states that have ended lockdowns.

Another resemblance is mission creep. One big reason for the self-created exit trap is that the original mission of flattening the curve so the health system could cope with a slowed spread of the virus, has morphed into the more ambitious but impossible mission of eliminating the virus. Good luck with that. Finally, like the US media in 2003, many mainstream media commentators today have abandoned critical inquisitiveness to become cheerleaders for the war on corona.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Corona and the Iraq War: The response to the coronavirus crisis has seven disturbing echoes of the 2003 Iraq W - Economic Times

Jun 5, 2020

Facebook closed several accounts and pages linked to Kurdish intelligence in Iraq last month. The pageswereused by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in its political rivalry with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), according to findings from a report released by Facebook today.

In May, Facebook closed 324 pages, 71 accounts, five groups and 31 Instagram accounts that it linked to the Zanyari agency, according to a Facebook statement. The intelligence agency is controlled by the PUK, which is the second largest party in Iraqi Kurdistan and dominatesSulaimaniyah province. The strongholds of the largest party, the KDP, are in Erbil and Dahuk provinces. The PUK is historically close to Iran, while the KDP has an economic relationship with Turkey.

The users engaged in what Facebook describes as coordinated inauthentic behavior. This is defined as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation, the Facebook statement read.

The accounts and pages in question impersonated local politicians and posed as news agencies. Around $270,000 was spent on advertisements promoting the content and more than 4 million people followed at least one of the pages, according to Facebooks May report for coordinated inauthentic behavior released today.

They content they pushed advanced anti-KDP narratives involving the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).Some of the posts were about alleged ties between some Kurdish politicians and Turkey, according to the report. The KDP is often criticized for its economic relationship with Turkey due to Turkeys military conflict with Kurdish groups in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

The Facebook report also included a post showing the late Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadis picture next to the KDPs logo. The Kurdish-language caption claimed his wife was in the KDP stronghold ofErbil, readingConfirmed by evidence: Abu Bakr El-Baghdadi's wife is in Erbil. If false, Let Erbil airport deny it.

The social network research firm Graphika likewise found that the posts targeted the KDP. A report Graphikareleased today on Facebooks findings showed that the accounts criticized KRG Prime Minister and senior KDP figure Masrour Barzani for his speech on the KRGs financial crisis last month, for example. The posts alleged that Masrour sought to blame the regions economic situation on his cousin, KRG President Nechirvan Barzani, according to Graphika.

The Zanyari intelligence agency could not be reached for comment. One KRG official said that the scenario laid out by Graphika is very accurate and that the PUK sought to criticize MasrourBarzani in particular.

A certain group within PUK has made a significant investment in cyberspace to target the KRG for one specific reason, namely the head of government, the prime minister, the official, who declined to give his name because of the potential political fallout, told Al-Monitor.

The findings also received significant attention on Kurdish social media. Some PUK-affiliated politicians frequently criticize the KRG on Twitter and other platforms.

This is not the first time Facebook has sought to limit information tied to Middle Eastern governments. In April, Facebook closed hundreds of pages and accounts after concluding they were linked to the Iranian government and were engagedin coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Facebook also began applying state-controlled labels to media outlets in Iran, Algeria, Russia and other countries yesterday. The companys head of cybersecurity policy said the labels will help inform users of the news they are consuming.

They combine the influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state, Facebook cybersecurity chief Nathaniel Gleicher said in a press release. People should know if the news they read is coming from a publication that may be under the influence of a government.

The list of news sites that now have the label includes Press TV and the Tasnim News Agency from Iran. In Algeria, Algerie Presse Service carries the designation, as does Agence Tunis Afrique Presse in Tunisia. In the Russian media, RT Arabic is also now designated as state-controlled. There are other outlets with the label as well, including Chinese and North Korean ones, a Facebook representativetold Al-Monitor.

The aforementioned outlets all had the state-controlled media label as today. Clicking on the label opens up a window that says the outlet is is partially or wholly under the editorial control of a state.

Facebook did not label some other state media outlets in the region as such, including TRT World in Turkey and SANA in Syria.

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Facebook closes accounts linked to Kurdish intelligence in Iraq - Al-Monitor