Behind the walls of ports and border crossings: Will the rotation movement succeed in breaking the stranglehold of smuggling and corruption?
Behind the walls of ports and border crossings: Will the rotation movement succeed in breaking the stranglehold of smuggling and corruption?
2026-06-23 03:52
Sadiq Al-Azraqi
The issue of border crossings in Iraq is a complex and sensitive one. The delay in implementing job rotation procedures (the periodic transfer of employees and officers) is due to the entanglement of interests and influence. Border crossings have always been areas of influence for political parties and armed groups that impose their control over the movement of goods and smuggling, making it difficult to make comprehensive rotation decisions without facing political pressure or direct obstruction of this decision.
The General Authority of Customs in Iraq says that it has completed the process of transferring, dismissing and rotating the directors of customs centers and their deputies, which came under the directives of Prime Minister Ali al-Zubaidi, including rotating all employees at border crossings without exception and obligating the Ministry of Interior to close all gaps and unauthorized land and sea border crossings, along with rotating all commanders of brigades and units in the Border Forces Command.
People are asking why these procedures were delayed at a time when there were reports of influence peddling in smuggling and the exploitation of checkpoints and road controls towards cities to extort and blackmail drivers?
Despite repeated calls in parliament for rotation of personnel, previous governments struggled to implement radical decisions due to the sensitivity of these positions as centers of enormous financial revenue. This made retaining certain individuals for extended periods a means of securing loyalty or protecting vested interests. Furthermore, there was a lack of effective oversight mechanisms, such as advanced sonar devices, network connectivity, and electronic systems like ASYCUDA (the automated customs data system). This gave port officials greater leeway to manipulate and extort without fear of digital accountability.
The rotation aims primarily to break the networks that form within the ports between employees, traders, and smugglers. The continued presence of an employee at the same port for years creates a fertile environment for extortion and smuggling, which is what the current government tried to break through the recent directive.
The directives issued by Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi were part of a package of exceptional measures that imposed a 48-hour deadline to prevent any interference or deals that might be made to halt the transfer or rotation decisions, according to observers. The decision included everyone without exception, including the rotation of brigade commanders in the border forces and the return of personnel assigned to the Border Ports Authority to the Ministry of Interior. This aims to dismantle networks of influence at those points, and security and intelligence agencies are now legally responsible for any breaches or smuggling within the ports, after previous responsibilities were overlapping and confused among multiple entities.
The new measures included obligating the Ministry of Interior to close all unofficial routes (the irregular roads used by smugglers to bypass official checkpoints). Historically, these routes were the biggest loophole allowing trucks to pass undetected by customs officials, and their exploitation was carried out under the protection of certain influential figures. The shift towards digitalization to reduce human interaction and a review of the security philosophy employed within cities represent one of the effective solutions.
According to experts, the technical solution is the only guarantee of integrity. Reducing direct interaction between the employee, the security officer, the merchant, and the driver is the fastest way to eliminate bribery. Activating the ASYCUDA system and fully implementing it electronically at all ports reduces manipulation of customs duties. Furthermore, electronic tracking (GPS) must be used, requiring trucks to have tracking systems that connect them to a central security operations center, so that their routes are known from the moment they enter the port until they reach the warehouses, making any deviation towards unofficial routes immediately monitored.
Current legislation in Iraq often lacks sufficient strictness regarding job-related extortion, and the existence of a special law that criminalizes the exploitation of influence at checkpoints and considers it a breach of professional trust and warrants severe imprisonment is an urgent necessity. The abolition of checkpoints is a topic of discussion among security and economic experts, and the dimensions of this proposal can be summarized as follows: abolishing checkpoints would drastically reduce transportation costs (drivers’ wages, waiting time, and illegal tolls), which would positively affect the prices of goods for the consumer, since checkpoints have often turned into illegal collection centers, and abolishing them would mean closing these sources and ending the state of fear and anticipation that drivers experience at every checkpoint.
On the other hand, security leaders believe that these checkpoints constitute an important intelligence depth for apprehending wanted individuals and seizing prohibited materials such as drugs and weapons, as they put it. In order for the cancellation of the checkpoints to be safe, they must be replaced with smart checkpoints that rely on surveillance cameras and the recognition of car license plates by artificial intelligence instead of a heavy human presence.
The transition from security based on manual inspection and detention at checkpoints to security based on information and technology is the biggest challenge in Iraq. It is clear that corruption has established a parallel structure for itself through traditional checkpoints, and dismantling this structure requires political will to bypass the parties that benefit from these checkpoints, technological investment that compensates for the need for human control, and punitive legislation that does not protect the extortionist employee under the guise of security duty.
In Iraq, there are what are called “economic offices” of parties and militias. They are not just external parties, but rather entities that have infiltrated the joints of the state, and they operate according to the logic of the parallel economy that feeds on the paralysis of the official state. The attempt to circumvent government decisions, such as the recent rotation decision, usually takes place through scenarios that have become well known. When the government issues a decision to rotate officers or employees, the influential parties often transfer their followers from one position to another within the same system, or replace them with “front” figures who do not have real decision-making power, while the shadow managers remain the ones who pull the strings from behind the curtain.
If the interests of the economic offices are threatened, these entities resort to escalating security tensions or creating artificial crises such as blocking roads or paid demonstrations to force the government to back down or freeze its decisions. They also invoke security necessities and the fragile situation, which is the most effective weapon for obstructing laws. Once a security designation is applied to a particular location, such as a border crossing or checkpoint, it becomes prohibited to subject it to civilian or technical oversight, and it turns into an armed enclave. If Prime Minister Ali Falih al-Zaidi is serious about these steps, then the next battle will be a test of the state’s ability to protect its decisions. Success here is not measured by the issuance of the decision, but by dismantling the economic offices that manage these resources, according to what specialists suggest. They emphasize that dismantling them can only happen by cutting off their illegal funding, which makes confrontation inevitable.
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