Abbas al-Maliki Informed Comment
Karbala, Iraq. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Haider Jazi has been forced to park his truck in a line of idle trucks on the road to the al-Sheeb border crossing with Iran, in Iraq’s Maysan province, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) southeast of Baghdad.
Since the crossing opened, Haider, 36, has hauled goods from Iran into the Iraqi interior. That work supports a family of seven, along with his elderly father, who has diabetes, and his mother, whose eyesight has been weakened by illness. But on October 21, the Iraqi government shut the gate indefinitely, citing “technical reasons.” Now all he can do is stand with the protesters, repeating that a government meant to make people’s lives easier is only making them harder.
Thousands of families depend on this road, in a province plagued by unemployment and low incomes despite sitting on some of Iraq’s richest oil fields. Residents from many walks of life have joined the drivers in protest, some calling the crossing the lung through which their city breathes. Baghdad has not listened.
Its silence has an explanation that has nothing to do with Maysan. After the government cited technical problems, then drug and counterfeit-currency smuggling, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein revealed that the U.S. Treasury Department had formally asked Iraq to close all its land crossings with Iran except two, and that the closure came under American pressure. Days before al-Sheeb closed, Pakistan shut its Taftan and Gabd-Rimdan crossings with Iran, and that same month Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington was working with Pakistan and Turkey to cut off Iran’s land routes.
Since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran on February 28, Washington has blockaded Iran’s ports and squeezed its airspace. Now it has turned to the land routes, in a campaign of economic strangulation meant to force Tehran to accept Trump’s terms. Haider found himself a party to a war he knows nothing about, except that it has stopped his truck’s wheels and cut off his family’s livelihood.
Yet the siege aimed at Tehran hits Iraqis first. Through these crossings flow vegetables, fruit, food and building materials into markets that depend on imports for even their most basic needs. Iranian customs data put Iran’s non-oil exports to Iraq near $12 billion a year. These goods are affordable because Iran’s currency has lost much of its value against the dinar, and they matter more than ever as Iraq’s trade through the Strait of Hormuz, its oil export route, has faltered, at a cost the foreign minister put at $60 billion.
A market this dependent on its crossings shakes when even one closes. Within days, vegetable and fruit prices in Maysan rose noticeably. The damage goes beyond goods: the crossing carries pilgrims, students and patients, and roadside shops and restaurants live off that traffic. The decision sent shockwaves through Maysan. Mustafa Duair al-Muhammadawi, the elected provincial council head, threatened civil disobedience; an arrest warrant was issued, and he was released after appearing in court.
Stranger still, the government knows the harm it is causing. The foreign minister himself conceded that closing all the crossings would be difficult and would hurt the economy. Yet the government pressed ahead, as though refusing Washington weighed more heavily in its calculations than the hunger of its own citizens.
Every official in Baghdad knows why. Since the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s oil revenues, which fund about 90 percent of the state budget, have been deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and those dollars reach Baghdad only through a channel controlled by the U.S. Treasury. Iraqis have felt this weapon before. When Iraq asked U.S. troops to leave in 2020, Washington, according to Reuters, threatened to cut off its access to its own funds, and Baghdad backed down. Last April, the Treasury blocked a cash shipment of nearly half a billion dollars of Iraqi oil money and suspended shipments for months to pressure the government over the armed factions. A country whose revenues pass through New York is in no position to say no, even about its own borders.
Photo of street sweeper in Karbala, Iraq, by Hussain Badshah on Unsplash
So Iraq pays for a conflict in which it has no stake, and its government’s helplessness is a bitter harvest of the 2003 invasion. Washington occupied the country over weapons of mass destruction it never found, tore down a functioning state, and promised a model democracy, only to leave Iraq divided and faltering. More than twenty years later, Iraq has no industry worth mentioning, its electricity fails in summers above 50 degrees Celsius (122°F), and it lives on oil and imports of the simplest goods.
Iraqis will not be the only losers; Washington is losing too, without realizing it. Weakening Iraq’s Iran-aligned armed factions has long been its stated goal, the very reason it halted dollar shipments in April. Yet closing the crossings pushes in the opposite direction: by hurting ordinary Iraqis, it hands those factions a ready-made popular cause. As soon as the arrest warrant against the Maysan council head was issued, the Badr bloc, the parliamentary arm of one of the oldest factions and among the closest to Tehran, rushed to defend him, while the Islamic Resistance in Iraq accused Baghdad of bowing to American dictates. To many residents, these forces now look like the only defenders of their daily bread. The protesters also blocked roads to the Buzurgan oil fields and the provincial refinery, and with oil markets already shaken by the disruption in Hormuz, unrest in an Iraqi oil province is the last thing Washington needs. The United States lost some 4,500 soldiers and spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq to win an ally. Today its own policy is pushing Iraqis toward its adversaries, as they watch Washington close the doors to their livelihoods and hear its president repeat, as he has for years, that America should take Iraq’s oil.
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