Another Ban Failed: Iraq

Islamic State lifts smoking ban in Kirkuk
Authorities in Iraqi province seek to counter increasing hostility from locals
September 22, 2014,
BY JUSTIN JALIL
The Islamic State group has revoked a smoking ban in the Iraqi province of Kirkuk in an effort to improve its image and battle growing popular disfavor.
Vendors in the region can now openly sell cigarettes without fear of prosecution, according to a report published Thursday by the Arabic-language Almada Press news agency.
The group’s image was heavily tarnished in the region following battles with Kurdish fighters in the area, its brutal treatment and executions of Iraqi soldiers and Western civilians.
The Middle East boasts some of the highest rates of smoking in the world, but smoking is considered “haram,” forbidden, according to some radical interpretations of Islam.
Abdulrahman al-Gabouri, a resident of Kirkuk province, told Almada Press that the Islamic State had confiscated cigarette stocks after the jihadist group conquered the region several months ago. Al-Gabouri stated that the group later destroyed the cigarettes by running over them with American-made military hummers appropriated from Iraqi security forces.
According to another resident in the province, Islamic State fighters warned shop owners several weeks ago that they would be lashed if they were caught selling cigarettes, in accordance with a fatwa issued by the group’s judicial authorities.

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Bogged Down on Big Issues, Iraq Takes Aim at Smoking
May 12, 2011
By JACK HEALY

BAGHDAD — In a country where the power blinks out several times a day, where filling up a gas tank can take hours and motorists stew in seemingly endless traffic jams, smoking is one thing that seems blissfully easy.

A pack of cigarettes costs as little as 25 cents. They are ubiquitous, sold from mud-brick huts along highways, from card tables set up on city sidewalks and at countless storefronts throughout Baghdad. And you can light up pretty much anywhere, from buses to elevators to hospitals. Even (or especially) inside the Iraqi Parliament.

But following the lead of New York, London, Paris and scores of other Western cities, Iraqi lawmakers are now trying to push smoking to the margins of public life here, to the frustration of many of their constituents.

On Sunday, they are set to consider a law that would ban smoking from schools, universities, government offices and a wide range of private businesses, including restaurants and cafes. Billboards advertising cigarettes, which wallpaper commercial districts of Baghdad, would be outlawed. And cigarette companies would be forced to print harsher warning labels.

“This is an important issue,” said Jawad al-Bazouni, a member of Parliament’s Health Committee, which is pushing for the restrictions. “The citizen can complain to the smoker. He will get the law on his side, and it will be reflected in the public health.”

But some Iraqis called Parliament’s effort a quixotic waste of time by a legislature that has dithered on questions of greater import, like whether American troops should be allowed to stay past a withdrawal deadline of January 2012.

The prospects for passage of the tobacco ban are, well, cloudy, at best.

In the six months since competing factions quilted together a partnership government, Iraq’s Parliament has passed about 10 laws, none of them highly controversial.

They have passed a budget, canceled some Saddam Hussein-era measures and moved to cut their own salaries and increase some public aid in response to calls for government reform.

Politicians in the Shiite-led government have also spent time on impassioned speeches defending fellow Shiite protesters in Bahrain, and took a day off in solidarity. After a tortured debate, they approved a procedure for selecting vice presidents, but have yet to name one.

Through this, Iraq’s leaders have moved slowly on resolving the status of the disputed northern city of Kirkuk, an oil-rich prize that is one of Iraq’s biggest trouble spots. They have not named ministers to lead the army and police forces, leaving a vacuum that some Iraqis blame for a recent spike in assassinations and other violence.

“There are more important issues they should be considering,” said Aboud al-Dulaimi, who was sitting with two friends outside a tiki-themed hookah bar in downtown Baghdad. “The government needs to pass laws to serve the people. They have more than three million unemployed, and they are busy with such laws.”

Sitting beside him, Abbas al-Janabi took a drag and declared, “It’s stupidity.”

Mr. Janabi, 46, said he had been a pack-a-day smoker in the 15 years before the 2003 American invasion. But in the chaos that followed, as he shut down his once prosperous factory, sold his house and moved abroad, Mr. Janabi said he began smoking more.

Now back in Baghdad after a brief exile in Dubai and Syria and living in a small apartment on Palestine Street, Mr. Janabi said he burned through four packs a day as he scavenged for work. He knows the habit may be his death, but he treats it with a fatalism commonly heard throughout Iraq.

“I know a cigarette will kill me one day, but I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “I may get killed tomorrow. It’s just fate.”

Parliament tried such a move once before, in 2009, but dropped the measure. It was reintroduced in April, and lawmakers have scheduled a second reading for Sunday, a necessary step toward passage.

Although smoking rates in Iraq lag far behind those in China, Russia and much of eastern Europe, few women or devout Muslims smoke, meaning that the rate among men is considerably higher. With Iraq’s cigarette consumption among the highest in the Middle East, smoking is easily Baghdad’s most widespread vice.

Bars and public alcohol consumption have rebounded as Iraq’s streets have become safer to traverse at night, but Islamic prohibitions against drinking and raids of Baghdad’s nightclubs have limited the spread of alcohol. At most cafes and restaurants, Iraqis sip fruit juice or tea instead of liquor, and content themselves with cigarettes and shisha — flavored tobacco from ornate water pipes.

Ali Assan Ali said his shisha cafe would be devastated by an outright ban on smoking in public places. He said he had spent $400,000 to open the business and renovate a second-floor space, and said the proposed smoking restrictions were too broad.

“This is my life, this is my health,” he said.

Nearby sat four friends, who expressed a similarly libertarian view.

“We are Iraqi,” said Rami Sabah, 19. “We like the shisha and the smoking. It’s a good place for young people to just waste time.”

His friend Baraa Ghazi, 27, offered a broader pronouncement as he took a languid drag. “This,” he said, “is freedom.”

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No Smoking in the Green Zone

September 18, 2006

There have been a bunch of books about the mistakes made after the American invasion of Baghdad, George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate and Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco being the two best in my opinion.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an excerpt from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s effort. He was their bureau chief there for a few years and his book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, will be released tomorrow.

I haven’t read the book, but the excerpt is as damning as anything could be. It outlines how people were recruited to serve in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the group that ran Iraq right after the invasion. Instead of qualifications in Arabic or post-conflict experience or anything, Chandrasekaran reports that the key item on anyone’s resume was ties to the Republican Party.

One little bit in the piece explains something that baffled me at the time. Here’s the quote about James K. Haveman Jr., who was put in charge of Iraq’s health care system:

Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq. He approached problems the way a health care administrator in America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment.

He urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team — who turned out to be a closet smoker himself — to lead the public education effort. Several members of Haveman’s staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA’s limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.

Iraqis smoke. I have no idea what the percentage is countrywide, but the idea of a no-smoking area hasn’t really penetrated. The convention center in the Green Zone (where the new Iraqi parliament meets) is one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen, a massive concrete structure that looks like a fortress. For years after the invasion, the building was a no-smoking zone. Uptight Americans would reprimand everyone who lit up, including Iraqi political leaders. A group of Iraqi politicians and aides would gather and look guiltily around until they hit a crucial number — maybe 15 or so — then everyone would light up at once. It was a weird sight. And then some American would tell them to put it out. Now, this is in the building that is the center of the new Iraqi government and the politicians were told by low-level hacks to not smoke. And, of course, the smoking area outside occasionally got hit by mortars.

I am happy to report though, that the new government has now installed ashtrays in the convention center and parliamentarians can now smoke in peace, and maybe try to grapple with some real issues.

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Baghdad Seeks Smoking Ban

By ROD NORDLAND
August 6, 2009

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s cabinet announced Thursday that it planned to ban smoking from all public places, in what would be one of the first such laws in the Middle East. The restrictions may go even further than smoking bans in Western countries by outlawing smoking in “private transportation.”

The stance is particularly aggressive — and perhaps unenforceable — especially in a nation where cigarettes sell for as little as 40 cents a pack and smoking in public areas and workplaces is widespread. But it coincides with the government’s attempts to improve living conditions here, like Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s order on Wednesday to remove blast walls from most of Baghdad within 40 days.

Yet even as the government tried to turn its attention toward these issues, the rough and tumble of Iraqi politics remained very much in evidence. The Ministry of the Interior released a statement on Wednesday clarifying its earlier announcement that a “gang of bodyguards” for Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi had been responsible for a bloody bank robbery last month. The clarification praised his help in apprehending the suspects.

Mr. Abdul Mahdi’s media office then responded Thursday with a clarification of that clarification. The robbery did not involve a gang from the Iraqi Army unit that guards the vice president, his office said. Instead, it said, only one of his bodyguards was involved, acting with criminals from “other units and institutions.”

Violence also continued to challenge the prime minister’s plan to remove the blast walls and restore a sense of normalcy in Baghdad. On Thursday, two roadside bombs exploded in Mansour, wounding three civilians, and a bomb hidden in a displaced person’s house in Dora killed a family member who had returned to check the house. A Shiite pilgrim en route to Karbala was killed when a so-called sticky bomb on the underside of his car exploded in Dora; three passengers were wounded.

Late on Wednesday, followers of Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American cleric, issued an unusual, handwritten statement in which Mr. Sadr denounced the government for bringing violent insurgents into its fold.

The statement stemmed from a deal Mr. Maliki negotiated with a Shiite special group to renounce violence against Iraqis and join the political process. The group, Asa’ib al-Haq, had boasted of killing five American soldiers and kidnapping five British contractors, four of whom either have been found dead or are presumed dead. It did not renounce violence against foreigners. The group had broken away from Mr. Sadr earlier when he renounced violence.

“Any group that belongs to the resistance does not have the right to interfere in politics at all,” Mr. Sadr’s statement said.

“I advise the government not to engage with any military groups in general,” he wrote, “because they are against the Iraqi people and were involved in the spilling of Iraqi blood.”

In the bank robbery, seven men entered the main branch of Al Rafidain Bank unopposed, apparently because of their official positions. The state-owned bank is in the Karada area, which is heavily guarded because many officials live there. The eight bank guards inside did not resist, but the robbers killed them all, possibly out of fear of being identified. They made off with an estimated $5 million.

The Interior Ministry said that it had seized five of the perpetrators, but that the two ringleaders had fled the country. One of them was previously identified as Capt. Lazem Dayekh, a member of the vice president’s guard.

Many people blamed political maneuvering for the dispute over who had supposedly solved the case first. Mr. Abdul Mahdi and the minister of the interior, Jawad al-Bolani, are rivals and possible opponents of Mr. Maliki in national elections.

“There are political motives behind this crime,” Mr. Abdul Mahdi’s statement said.

Mr. Bolani was loudly criticized by the vice president’s supporters when he made a similar charge a week earlier at a news conference about the robbery.

Almost as contentious will be the government’s proposed smoking ban, which still is subject to a vote in Parliament. It would apply to all public buildings, government offices, movie theaters, schools and both public and private transportation.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi insurgent group with some foreign leadership, had tried to ban smoking in the Sunni communities it controlled, on religious grounds. Many local residents have cited that attempt as one of the reasons Sunnis turned on the group.

Issam Shakir Mahmoud, 84, a tobacco vendor, did not think the plan was much of a threat to his livelihood. “The government cannot even control the security situation,” he said. “How could they enforce this law?”

Sam Dagher and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting

Troops Celebrate Low – Key 4th in Iraq
July 4, 2006
RAMADI, Iraq (AP) — It was a far cry from the Fourth of July parties a world away, but five U.S. Marines in one of Iraq’s most dangerous cities celebrated with what they had: a hookah, relaxing exhales of strawberry-scented smoke and thoughts of home.
… But the Marines still had their hookah, which had become a center point for socializing after they ran out of DVDs to watch. They bought the pipe for about $45 from an Iraqi shop on their base, which also supplied them with flavored tobacco.
”We get to know people better. We get to be tighter. It’s a communal thing,” Mallett said after taking a puff from the gurgling pipe.