The Biden-Harris State Department is slated to host a senior Iraqi official allegedly involved in "industrial-scale sanctions evasion on behalf of the regime in Iran," prompting Congress to demand the administration revoke his American visa.
On Monday, the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources will hold an event at Rice University in Houston with Iraqi oil minister Hayyan Abdul-Ghani, who has helped convert Baghdad’s energy sector "into a powerful and endemic means by which Iran-Aligned Militia Groups (IAMGs) and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) generate terrorist financing," according to five GOP House lawmakers, who are investigating the Iraqi official’s ties to Tehran.
Led by Foreign Affairs Committee member Rep. French Hill (R., Ark.), the lawmakers are urging the Biden-Harris administration to "prevent Minister Abdul-Ghani from attending events in the United States until these allegations are investigated and the findings are presented to Congress." In the interim, Abdul-Ghani and his delegation should "no longer be granted visas to the United States," they wrote in a Wednesday investigatory letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The sanctions evasion scheme, which has picked up pace as Iran co-opts high-ranking Iraqi officials and institutions, is estimated to generate nearly $1 billion per year, lining Tehran’s coffers at a time when it is fomenting terrorism against Israel and American forces in the Middle East. Abdul-Ghani's oil ministry, according to a recent Washington Institute for Near East Policy report, helped establish "a mechanism for diverting Iraqi government oil to militias" through "asphalt plants run by Iran-backed terrorists." Information about his role in the Iranian smuggling network was presented to the State Department and intelligence community officials in June, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The Biden-Harris administration has done little to disrupt Tehran’s oil smuggling operations and the State Department’s upcoming event with Abdul-Ghani indicates the United States is still trying to drive investments into Baghdad’s energy sector.
Iraq has been morphing into an Iranian client state for many years, with IRGC-backed militia groups proliferating across the country and using it as a launching pad for attacks on American outposts. Baghdad’s energy sector, the globe’s fifth-largest oil producer, has increasingly shut out America-aligned elements, including the pro-U.S. Kurds, raising concerns with American investors and lawmakers in Congress.
Abdul-Ghani will arrive in Texas with officials from Iraq’s oil ministry, electricity ministry, and prime minister’s office, according to an invitation for the Monday event viewed by the Free Beacon. While at Rice University, Abudl-Ghani will participate in "two invitation-only roundtable dialogues focused on oil and gas development and power sector." The State Department’s assistant secretary in the bureau of energy resources, Geoffrey Pyatt, will attend on behalf of the U.S. government.
The goal of the visit is to drive greater American investment into the Iraqi oil sector amid mounting concerns that Baghdad is helping Iran offload its heavily sanctioned crude oil and obfuscating its origins. Militia groups tied to the Iranian regime are known to pull tax revenue from oil shipments and help move Iranian oil to the marketplace under false labels.
"This is enabling U.S.-designated terrorist entities to facilitate mass sanctions evasion by allowing U.S.-sanctioned Iranian oil exports to reach the world market labeled as Iraqi oil," according to the lawmakers, which include Reps. Kevin Hern (R., Okla.), Michael Waltz (R., Fla.), Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), and Michael Lawler (R., N.Y.).
The legislators suspect the sanctions busting scheme involves "the abuse of Iraq’s access to the U.S. dollar through oil sales to give Iran illicit access to" American currency.
The sheer scale of the operation suggests cooperation from Abdul-Ghani, his government office, and a slew of other senior Iraqi officials, who the lawmakers say are "overseeing and profiting from corruption."
"It is highly likely," they say, "that officials in the Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office, Iraqi Ministry of Oil, State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), and Ministry of Transport are aware of, and complicit in, this sanctions evasion mechanism."
One of the central militia groups involved in the scheme is Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, a U.S.-designated terror outfit working at Iran’s behest inside Iraq. Through its control of oil companies, the terror group has been able to meddle with Iraqi oil, likely injecting Iranian crude into the stock.
In other instances, "Iraqi fuel has been diverted from its intended industrial uses and instead smuggled onto the international market, benefiting the IRGC and Iran’s proxies in Iraq," according to the GOP lawmakers.
While the Biden-Harris administration has investigated these plots in the past, it has not moved forward with sanctions on any of the Iraqi government officials alleged to be involved.
The lawmakers are pushing the White House to formally investigate Abdul-Ghani’s oil ministry to determine if it has violated sanctions that are in place to stymie Iran’s oil trade.
"Given the likely scale and timeframe of these evasion schemes, it is likely that they have been developed or expanded during the tenure of Minister Abdul-Ghani, drawing on his knowledge and resources as the former director of Basra Oil Company," they wrote.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on Abdul-Ghani's upcoming visit or the concerns raised by lawmakers.
Iraq’s tumultuous oil trade has long been a source of friction in the region, with Baghdad's government working to freeze exports emanating from the Kurdistan region, a staunch U.S. ally. American investments totaling more than $10 billion "are now at risk" due to the Iraqi government’s efforts to suppress Kurdish oil and cut off their revenue, the Free Beacon reported in January.