Iraq’s Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has dismissed nine senior security officials over an alleged oil smuggling operation in the Jurf al-Nasr area, a stronghold of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah group.
Al-Zaidi chaired an emergency security meeting to review the findings of a committee investigating smuggling in Jurf al-Nasr, Babil province, military spokesperson Sabah al-Numan told the Iraqi News Agency (INA).
The move follows an investigation that uncovered illegal oil refineries and evidence of manipulation linked to the smuggling activities.
“In light of the investigation’s findings, [the prime minister] ordered that all individuals accused of involvement in oil smuggling operations be referred to the judiciary,” al-Numan said.
The prime minister “also ordered the dismissal” of nine officials, including security and intelligence officers in Babil province, an Interior Ministry commander, and the director of the Oil Pipelines Company at the Ministry of Oil, he said.
The police chief of Babil province was among those dismissed.
Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-aligned paramilitary group and one of Iraq’s most heavily armed factions, has recently issued several sharp statements against the prime minister, threatening his government and accusing him of corruption.
Senior Iraqi politicians previously told the AFP news agency that al-Zaidi had repeatedly said he was ready to confront groups refusing to disarm.
Al Jazeera’s Peter Smith, reporting from Baghdad, said previous Iraqi governments had been careful not to address the issue of an alleged oil smuggling network worth up to $30m monthly.
“This area had effectively been run as a state within a state until now,” Smith said. “But that seems to have changed, with Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi saying that no inch of Iraq will be allowed to have oil smuggling operations like this.”
Two strategic oil pipelines running through the south of the country, just south of Baghdad, “had effectively been tapped into”, Smith said, citing a leaked intelligence report. “Oil was being siphoned off, stolen, and then sold on the black market in an operation worth tens of millions of dollars every month.”
On Wednesday, the INA reported that “intelligence documents” containing satellite images “showed crude oil and oil-derivatives smuggling operations carried out by an armed faction” in Jurf al-Nasr, accusing an unnamed group of tapping into a pipeline there.
Al-Numan said the investigating committee “confirmed the accuracy” of the information.
Akeel Abbas, a senior non-resident fellow at the Iraq Initiative within the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera that oil smuggling by various political factions and armed groups “is common in Iraq” due to “commercial rather than political or strategic” gains.
Abbas said the latest crackdown has more to do with “militia disarmament”.
“The prime minister cleverly decided to frame it as anticorruption. That is why a few days ago, there was a report leaked by the government about this operation,” he said.
The prime minister wants to “cut off the financial lifeline to this particular group that has been so resistant” to the government’s “militia disarmament” initiatives, he added.
