Corruption lets Iraqi criminals off the hook
Weak institutions and corruption mean that major crimes in Iraq are not being investigated or prosecuted.
In 2014, Iraq suffered significant terrorist activity, even including high treason, that led to the fall of Mosul and Tikrit to the Islamic State (IS) in April 2014. In the same month, at the Speicher military base, IS forces captured and executed 1,700 army cadets. Six months later, officials have yet to determine whose negligence allowed these crimes to happen or to punish those responsible for the violence.
It seems that both crimes will be forgotten and their perpetrators unpunished, as was the case for dozens of others committed in Iraq in the past few years. The kidnapping of the Iraqi Olympic Committee in July 2006, 150 members of a delegation from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in December 2006 in Baghdad and the national Taekwondo team (which was killed) in 2006 are just a few examples on these forgotten crimes.
In the subsequent years, many other crimes, such as raiding prisons to free prisoners and robbing banks, have occurred in Iraq. When investigations were inconclusive, the perpetrators went unpunished. On Sept. 10, parliament member Abdel Hussein al-Musawi revealed that a group was even working to smuggle the perpetrators of the Speicher execution out of Iraq.
In its 2014 report, Amnesty International said that impunity in Iraq is absolute. For the sixth year in a row, the Committee to Protect Journalists put the rate of impunity for the crime of killing journalists in Iraq at 100%, with 10 journalists killed in 2013.
