Iraq PM dismisses nine officials over oil smuggling in Babil

Iraq's prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, has dismissed nine officials, among them the police chief of Babil province, after an investigation into oil smuggling in Jurf al-Nasr, a town in the province south of Baghdad that the Iran-aligned Kataib Hezbollah group has long dominated. The area is also known as Jurf al-Sakher.

Sabah al-Numan, the military spokesman, said the prime minister chaired an emergency security meeting to review the committee's findings and ordered that everyone accused of involvement in the smuggling be sent to the judiciary. Those dismissed, al-Numan said, include security and intelligence officers in Babil, an Interior Ministry commander and the director of the Oil Pipelines Company at the Oil Ministry.

The investigation followed a report on Wednesday by the state Iraqi News Agency, which said intelligence documents containing satellite images showed crude oil and oil derivatives being smuggled by an armed faction in Jurf al-Nasr. The agency did not name the faction. Al-Numan said the committee confirmed the accuracy of the information.

Middle East Eye reported that the committee entered Jurf al-Sakher on Friday, accompanied by members of Kataib Hezbollah, and that the dismissals were announced on Saturday.

Kataib Hezbollah is one of Iraq's most heavily armed factions. Al Jazeera reported that it has recently issued sharp statements against the prime minister's government, accusing it of corruption.

Al Jazeera's correspondent in Baghdad, Peter Smith, said two strategic oil pipelines running through the south of the country, just south of Baghdad, had effectively been tapped into. Citing a leaked intelligence report, he said oil was being siphoned off and sold on the black market in an operation worth tens of millions of dollars a month, and that previous Iraqi governments had been careful not to address a network worth up to $30m monthly.

Akeel Abbas, a senior non-resident fellow at the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera that smuggling by political factions and armed groups is common in Iraq because the gains are commercial rather than political or strategic. He said the crackdown is really about militia disarmament, and that the prime minister had chosen to frame it as anti-corruption.

Senior Iraqi politicians told the AFP news agency that al-Zaidi had repeatedly said he was ready to confront groups refusing to disarm.