Iraq arrests politicians in Green Zone anti-corruption raids

Elite Counter Terrorism Service units stormed homes inside Baghdad’s Green Zone overnight and detained politicians and senior officials in a corruption sweep ordered by Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi. The fortified district, which houses government offices and foreign embassies, was sealed off before the raids began, turning a tightly controlled part of Baghdad into the opening scene of a high-stakes test for Iraq’s anti-corruption drive.

The arrests were tied to statements made by former Deputy Minister of Oil Adnan al-Jumaili, who was arrested last month. Some of those taken into custody included members of parliament whose immunity had been lifted, and the broader sweep eventually reached 47 officials. Authorities have not yet said how many people were detained in the first wave alone, but the operation clearly aimed higher than the usual midlevel graft case.

The scale of the underlying oil-ministry investigation gives the campaign unusual weight. Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said investigators had already seized about $86 million in cash in the case linked to al-Jumaili. The same probe also turned up 70 properties, 21 vehicles and about three kilograms of gold jewelry, a haul that suggests a network built around large transfers of wealth rather than isolated bribery.

That background matters because corruption remains one of Iraq’s most persistent political weaknesses. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index gave Iraq a score of 28 out of 100, placing it 136th out of 182 countries. The World Bank has said Iraq continues to face weak public-sector governance, limited job creation and poor service delivery, conditions that keep graft at the center of public anger and slow the state’s ability to deliver basic services.

The raids also came just days after the United Nations Development Programme and Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, with support from the European Union, reviewed draft findings from trial monitoring on grand corruption cases in Baghdad on June 20. That broader institutional backdrop makes the Green Zone arrests more than a single security action: they are a credibility test for whether Iraq will move beyond headline detentions and into prosecutions, asset recovery and consequences for powerful figures across party lines. If the campaign stops at a few arrests, it will look selective. If it reaches senior officials and produces convictions, it could mark a rare break in a system long defined by impunity.