The EPIC Blog

As the United States prepares for a reduction in our military forces in Iraq, we cannot abandon the people whose lives have been irrevocably changed by the seven-year American occupation. As President Obama has emphasized, the United States has a moral responsibility to the Iraqi people. Such were the themes of the recent hearing of the Helsinki Commission on Capitol Hill called "No Way Home, No Way to Escape: The Plight of Iraqi Refugees and Our Iraqi Allies."

Seven years of conflict, not to mention decades of violence under Saddam Hussein, have left more than 2.8 million Iraqis displaced inside Iraq but far from home. Like refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) have lost their homes, property, and livelihoods. They’re often separated from their families and they may face violence in their host communities. Unlike refugees, however, they are not formally protected under international law, and post-conflict governments often lack the capacity to protect them.

While Iraq’s politicians attempt to knit together a coalition and a new government, everyday Iraqis are left coping with even more fundamental problems: severe shortages in electricity and water. Combined with political limbo and violence, surging temperatures are resulting in a torrid summer in Iraq.

Protests in Basra over the Iraqi government’s failure to provide the population with consistent electricity turned violent when police fired into the crowd on June 20. The crowd had been demanding the resignation of electricity minister. After revolts later spread to Nasiriya, Karbala, Baquba, and Ramadi, electricity minister Karim Wahid al-Aboudi resigned last Monday.

Iraqi Kurdistan has gained a reputation as an emerging democracy in the Middle East, but a major human rights violation persists without little action from the government: the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). A new report by Human Rights Watch details the practice, which is defined by the World Health Organization as "the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons." According to a study by the Iraqi NGO WADI, 72 percent of Kurdish women over the age of fourteen have been circumcised, most of them when they were between 3 and 12 years old.

Three and a half months after nationwide elections, Iraq is still without a new government. Today, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued an ultimatum to the divided parties saying he would intervene if a deal over how power will be meted out in the new government was not reached quickly.

Zardasht Osman was set to graduate from the University of Salahaddin in June with a degree in English. But on May 4, after his brother dropped Osman off near campus, he was kidnapped. Two days later, Osman's body was found, with signs of torture evident, fifty miles away in Mosul.

The story of the Iraqi Accountability and Justice and Election Commissions’ banning of 500 candidates from the March 2010 voting for alleged Baathist ties has taken a few new turns. First, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has finally come out in favor of the ban. He said that the decision of the Accountability and Justice Commission should be adhered to.

In mid-December 2009 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) held its annual meeting in Angola. Besides agreeing to keep oil prices at their current level of between $70-$80 a barrel, Iraq was the other hot topic of debate.

In mid-December 2009 the Iraqi Oil Ministry carried out its second round of bidding on oil fields by international companies. Winning offers were made on seven of the ten fields up for auction. Afterward Oil Minister Hussain Shahristani said Iraq could reach eleven million barrels a day in capacity in six years, which could make it one of the largest producers in the world. This may turn out to be a major setback for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and its own petroleum policy.

Iraq is entering its seventh year since the U.S. invasion. Many things have changed in that time period, from the chaos that followed the collapse of the state after Saddam was overthrown, to the civil war that erupted, to the Surge. At the end of 2009 three Iraq analysts, Sam Parker of the United States Institute for Peace, Michael Hanna of the Century Foundation, and Reidar Visser of the Norwegian Institute of International Relations, wrote pieces speculating on what lay ahead for Iraq.