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Sumedha Sharma

Tribune News Service

Gurugram, July 28

The Gurugram drug control department has busted a drug-smuggling cartel that not just hoarded Covid treatment medicines, but was to smuggle these to Iraq in an upcoming Vande Bharat flight.

Three foreigners, including two Iraqi men and an Uzbek woman, all working as translators, were nabbed from Sector 47 along with Remdesivir (48 vials), Fabiflu (55 strips) and Lopikast (18 packs) drugs.

Remdesivir costs Rs 5,400 per vial here and is reportedly sold for around Rs 1 lakh in Iraq. Similarly, Fabiflu strip is priced Rs 2,500 in India and sells for Rs 8,000 in Iraq. Lopikast vial costs Rs 3,990 here and goes for around Rs 15,000 in Iraq. The seizure has also brought thecitys Covid hospitals under scanner as drugs like Remdesivir are directly provided to hospitals by the manufacturing company after verifying patient details. The local drug department too is provided with a daily-dispensing report of these drugs. The police are probing whether any hospital helped the accused in procuring the drugs.

We got a tip-off and busted the racket. The accused procured the drugs at MRP from Gurugram and wanted to send these to Iraq, said Gurugram Drug Controller Amandeep Chauhan.

Sources said the cartel had somehow procured the traveller list of the forthcoming flight schedule for Iraq and planned to send the medicines in small batches with Iraqi nationals.

State Drug Controller Narender Ahuja said all district departments were on alert over black-marketing attempts of Covid drugs in Haryana. We have arranged direct company-to-hospital supply chains to stop black-marketing. Errants would face the music, he said.

Remdesivir sells for Rs 1L

Read more from the original source:
Bid to smuggle Covid drugs to Iraq, 3 held - The Tribune India

A second former executive of Monaco-based consultancy Unaoil has been jailed in the UK for his role in a multi-million-dollar bribery plot to secure oil infrastructure contracts in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Stephen Whiteley, 65, was jailed for three years on Thursday after being found guilty by a jury of paying bribes of more than $500,000 (Dh1.8 million) to secure a $55 million contract to build offshore moorings in the Arabian Gulf to allow tankers to load oil.

Whiteley, a former Unaoil territory manager for Iraq, and fellow ex-executive Ziad Akle, who was jailed for five years last week, said they plan to appeal against their convictions.

Unaoil acted as the middle-man for well-known companies vying for lucrative work after the chaos of the US-led war

The flagrant greed and callous criminality exhibited by these men undermines the reputation and integrity of British business on the international stage, said Lisa Osofsky, the head of the Serious Fraud Office, which investigated the case for four years. We will not cease in our mission to bring such people to justice.

A third Unaoil executive, Basil Al Jarah, pleaded guilty last year to paying bribes of more than $6m and will be sentenced in October.

British brothers Cyrus and Saman Ahsani who ran Unaoil struck a deal with prosecutors in the US where they last year admitted conspiring with companies to make corrupt payments of millions of dollars over 17 years from 1999 to government officials in nine countries.

Updated: July 31, 2020 03:19 PM

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Second former Unaoil executive jailed over Iraq contract bribe - The National

Thursday, July 30th 2020, 7:19 pm - The hot temperatures that were recently observed in Iraq were within one degree of an international record.

The Middle East has recently faced scorching temperatures as a heat dome sits over the region. The extreme weather is forcing millions indoors, straining electricity grids and breaking new temperature records.

Baghdad, Iraq reached a blistering 51.8C during the afternoon on July 28, which shattered its previous record high of 51C set on July 30, 2015. Little relief followed on July 29 when the city reached 51.1C, its second-highest temperature ever recorded.

Southeastern regions in Iraq saw even hotter temperatures on July 30 when weather stations in both Amara and Al Basrah peaked at 53.0C. Iraqs national temperature record is 53.8C, which was set in Basra in 2016, and is still the nations hottest temperature ever recorded.

The intense heat wave has also set record-breaking temperatures in other regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The Weather Network meteorologist Tyler Hamilton says that the sweltering conditions are courtesy of heat dome, which is a ridge of high pressure that has been stagnant over the Middle East.

The upper level atmosphere has created a sinking flow that has trapped hot air near the Earths surface underneath this dome.' High pressure systems also prevent cloud formation, which has allowed for clear skies and relentless sunshine in Iraq and resulted in unbelievably hot conditions.

The temperatures that were recently observed in Iraq were less than one degree shy from global records. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth are 53.9C ( 0.1C margin of uncertainty) in Mitribah, Kuwait on July 21, 2016 and 53.7C ( 0.4C) in Turbat, Pakistan on May 28, 2017.

Furnace Creek, Death Valley, California reached 56.7C on July,10 1913, but weather historians have questioned the accuracy of old temperature records and the meteorological technology that was used over a century ago.

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Several cities in Iraq reach 53C amid intense heat wave - The Weather Network

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a blue-ribbon commission and congressional committees uniformly blamed the U.S. national security apparatus for failing to connect the dots of evidence that might have exposed Osama bin Ladens plot.

Less than two years later, President George W. Bush launched a ruinous war in Iraq based on a far greater intelligence failure, one that saw the CIA, Pentagon and other agencies effectively make up the evidence that the White House sought to justify invading a country that had not attacked or even threatened to attack the United States.

The serial mistruths, mistakes and misperceptions about Iraqs supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged support for al-Qaida are laid out in devastating detail in Robert Drapers authoritative new book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.

This is well-trod history, but Draper mines newly declassified documents and tracks down previously unavailable CIA and Defense officials to flesh out the sordid story of the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the start of a grinding conflict that would last eight years and claim nearly 4,500 American lives.

Why now? Two decades on, there are no new headlines to be pulled from the toxic personal and policy disputes of the Bush era. But Draper has written a compelling narrative of just how calamitous an ideology-first approach to fact-finding can be in the White House, and why Americans were so badly deluded.

Unlike President Trump, who utters falsehoods daily, Bush was a true believer which is exactly what made him impervious to conflicting evidence or doubts about the supposed Iraqi threat.

That folly has given Americans just cause to question U.S. intelligence estimates and, perhaps worse, has gifted Trump with a regular foil for jabs at experts and specialists even in his own administration. The erosion of trust that fueled his base is just one of the many poisonous after-effects of the war.

The road to that war began a few days after the 2001 attacks, when Vice President Dick Cheney led his aides to CIA headquarters in Virginia. The nations top spy agency was frantically searching for a follow-up assault by bin Laden, who was based in Afghanistan.

But Cheney insisted the CIA needed to focus on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, despite the CIA briefers conviction that there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks. As one later said, it was like asking, Did Belgium do this?

Over the next year, Cheney and other ideologues would push their bogus theory, as well as increasingly dire but equally false claims that Hussein had secretly produced and stockpiled an arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

The Pentagon created its own so-called intelligence shop to funnel unsubstantiated reports to Cheney and Bush, many from informants with little credibility. Led by a deferential George Tenet, the CIA quickly fell in line, repeatedly strengthening its cautious assessments of the Iraqi threat to help the White House convince the public of an urgent danger.

Bush needed little convincing: he had ordered up Iraq war plans only two months after the Sept. 11 attacks. As Draper writes, the rush to war was driven by fear, not hard intelligence, and by imagination, not facts. It was thus difficult for critics to push back when Bush warned, in October 2002, that we cannot wait for the final proof the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Yet Iraq had no nuclear program, no poison gases, no shells filled with deadly viruses. U.N. inspectors had scoured the country for months, but their failure to find illicit weapons was viewed in Washington only as proof that Iraq had cleverly hidden them.

Draper has written the most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.

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The lies and mistakes that led us into Iraq, laid out in a new book - Wyoming Tribune

For the people of Iraq, the fallout from the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 continues to this day, sometimes in unexpected and violent ways. That is the message that the Iraqis featured in FRONTLINEs Once Upon a Time in Iraq emphasize time and again. The documentary recounts their stories of life under Saddam Hussein, the war, the occupation, and the years of chaos that followed from sudden explosions during the days of sectarian violence, to mass killing under the brutal reign of ISIS.

Some of them shared what has happened in their lives and in Iraq since they filmed with FRONTLINE.

In the documentary:

Sally Mars was six years old when the U.S.-led invasion began in March 2003. In the documentary, she recalled hearing shooting and explosions. I remember that a missile hit very close to our house, she said. And my mom, she threw herself on top of us, me and my brothers. The house was shaking, we thought it would come down on us.

Whats happened since?

I really feel like Ive changed since we filmed the interview, Mars said. I feel like Im 50 years older now.

In October 2019, mass demonstrations erupted in Iraq as people rallied against corruption, lack of services, and high unemployment rates. It was a main turning point, she said.

The protests were met with a violent response. Bodies were dropping on the streets and the firing just continued with smoke everywhere, while blood flowed from the victims like waterfalls.

Angry and resolved, Mars joined the protests on Oct. 26. Everything inside me changed as I walked on my own through the demonstrations, she said. People she didnt know gave her water and a mask for tear gas. She saw people cooking food for the protesters and helping the injured. From that point, she said: I learned what it meant to be someone that loves their country, and what it means to fight for your rights, and for your freedom in the face of death.

The Iraq war changed the entirety of our society for the worse and destroyed Iraqis as individuals, Mars said. Our generation started rebuilding the strength in personality of the Iraqi individual by reclaiming our original roots and culture.

In the documentary:

When Ahmed Albasheer first saw American soldiers in Iraq, he said he felt hope. I had this dream that my country is becoming one of the good countries in the Middle East, or maybe in the world. But as the occupation continued, he saw the rise of sectarian division, with people carrying two pieces of identification one for Sunni checkpoints and one for Shia checkpoints. In the documentary, Albasheer said America did two major bad things in Iraq: the first was the invasion, and the second was withdrawing before Iraq was ready.

Whats happened since?

Albasheer said he felt the height of hope last October when massive anti-government protests began. The young men took to the streets to challenge the government and to demand a homeland I would say that my hopes were very high at that point, he said. I believed that everything was possible then.

Since then, he fears that the militias have grown even more politically influential, and its become dangerous and nearly impossible for young people who want to change the system. Protesters, he said, are not only facing a corrupt political system but super powers.

I cant see a clear future for Iraq at the moment, Albasheer said, noting that hundreds of protesters have been killed.

Anyone who wants to express their opinion will either be killed, bribed, or get death threats, escape the country, and speak from exile like me and many others do, he said.

In the documentary:

In Once Upon a Time in Iraq, Um Qusay recalled that life in her town under Saddam Hussein meant hunger and war. We used to eat chicken feed, she said. There was no rest, we were always at war. Wars that were not even necessary. Um Qusay also lived through the bloody and brutal reign of ISIS. She told the story of how she and fellow townspeople helped hide Iraqi army cadets who were being targeted by ISIS. When asked why she risked her life to protect those men, she said, The reason was that first of all, they are Iraqi.

Whats happened since?

Since she filmed the interview, Um Qusay said that Iraq is getting worse and worse by the day. She said, Theres a lot of pressure on regular civilians murder, massacres, demonstrations I dont know how to explain this, but we have no hope.

Um Qusay added: There needs to be complete oversight on those governing Iraq, so that its made sure that theyre doing whats right for the country.

In the documentary:

Tahany Saleh was a university student when ISIS took over the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014. Then, her life came to a standstill. I stopped going to university. We stopped going into the street, she said. As the Iraq army and the anti-ISIS coalition fought ISIS, Saleh was among the civilians caught in the cross fire. The army was bombing and ISIS was bombing. And we were right in the middle.

Whats happened since?

Saleh was interviewed for Once Upon a Time in Iraq shortly after the war to retake Mosul from ISIS. I perceived life in an indescribably intense way, she recalled. I had an overwhelming sense of survival. I had a lot of hope for change. There was a sense of possibility that we were going to revive the country, bring the city back, be safe, be stable.

Since that time, she has found herself disappointed. Things are very difficult now, very difficult, because we feel extremely let down as Iraqis, she said. Violence has increased, along with the power and influence of militias. Those who call for change are targeted for assassination, she said. I dont feel safe. I dont feel like my family and friends are safe, she said. I fear looking at my phone because I cant handle finding out that another person has been assassinated for speaking out, for trying to improve the country.

Ultimately, Saleh wishes for a better future and for Americans to better understand Iraqis. I hope that things change and that we can go back to dreaming again, she said. I just want to be able to hope.

Vanessa Bowles contributed reporting.

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Four Iraqis on Searching For Hope 17 Years After the Iraq War - FRONTLINE