[Icelander]

Right, tomorrow I start my campaign.

I have to prepare the briefing materials for the characters. What I have already mentioned to them is that the Dhi Qar province has in the year 2011 experienced a sudden and dramatic drop in most metrics for governmental success.

Public works projects have stalled, suffered set-backs or failed entirely. Public unrest and reports of political opposition to the Governor and Chief of Police are on the rise. Unemployement is higher and filings for bankruptcy on the part of small businesses has skyrocketed. Evidence also suggests that many stores are simply closing, without filing any paperwork. Economic indicators are that the productivity of the province is almost in free fall.

Public health has plummeted, with at least two outbreaks of typhoid-like fevers in the year, as well as generally higher death rates among all demographics*. Rainfall has been far above average, but unseasonal cold snaps and high winds have played havoc with crops. In general, the weather has been extremely changable, with day temperatures that set records for heat (120° F / 49° C in September) and cold (43° F / 6° C in July). Dust storms and rain storms have both occured with depressing frequency and high winds have caused many deaths of people in the rural areas.

More to the point, the Ministry of Interior has detected a pattern of in financial reports and other intelligence that suggests that there is widespread embezzlement by low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats in most government departments, with at least $200,000,000 in public funds being unaccounted for in the province.

The embezzlement is sometimes blatant and on occasion so blatant that there was no conceivable way it would not be discovered. At other times, attempts have been made to alter paperwork or funnel the money through shell companies to hide the inappropriate transfers, but the vast majority of cases appear amateurish and high-risk, not a sustainable strategy for long-term political corruption.** And the funds apparently unaccounted for are almost two orders of magnitude higher than most estimates for corruption in the province the year before.

Any time the local Iraqi Police Service or officials from the Commission of Integrity have made an attempt to arrest people or witnesses have come forth with information about this corruption, some accident or apparently unconnected crime has occured to interfere with the proper functioning of justice.

Somewhere between 100-200 witnesses and suspects, depending on how credulous one is about this sort of thing; appear to have died in their sleep with or without explanation, had heart attacks in public or private, fallen to death at home or abroad, ran into traffic or otherwise contrived to be hit by a car, been caught in accidental house fires, had strokes, died of fever, killed themselves or were the victims of random shootings or bombings.

These deaths have all occured in a period just over five months, with more than half of them occuring in the last two months. No one is prepared to swallow this is a coincidence. Yet the local IPS has not replied to Ministry of Interior queries about this situation beyond noting that they find no connection between the deaths and no evidence of foul play in any of them. Investigations into the public corruption are described as 'ongoing'.

The Commission of Integrity has sent two missions to ascertain the truth of things. The first one was a simple fact-finding mission by a mid-ranking bureaucrat, which was quickly terminated when several local elites with good connections in Baghdad complained that the bureaucrat had behaved offensively and the bureaucrat was unable to explain his strange actions.

On another occasion, two months ago, they sent a respected judge accompanied by a team of Iraqi Federal Police officers. That team suffered through a frustrating month of investigation where witnesses and suspects died or disappeared at every turn. Finally, the judge made the controversial decision to call off the mission and go back. He cited lack of evidence of any wrongdoing as the reason, but when he got back, several of the IFP officers appeared to have been placed under arrest and the judge himself retired.

Finally, just over a month ago, the US State Department sent down an advisory team from the Anti-Corruption Coordination Office (ACCO), accompanied by several investigators from the Iraqi Commission of Integrity and a strong security element, both from Iraqi Federal Police officers and Triple Canopy. However, after a highly publicised incident where two contractors, one Third-Country National (TCN) and one Iraqi***, entered a private building and shot dead seven Iraqis, wounding four more, the whole team was pulled back twenty days ago.

Amidst mutual accusations, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what happened, but it is clear that the dead include a local religious figure, his wife and two daughers and three male students of his aged 8-11. The wounded were aged between 5-13 years, two of them children of the couple who owned the residence and two of them were other students. According to local IPS, there was no evidence of any insurgent activity in the house, the iman was well-known for his pacifism and no weapons were found at the scene.

The American ACCO team all have diplomatic passports and the United States moved fast to get them out of the country. They apparently claim that the two security guards were acting entirely on their own and have cited previous incidents of troubling professional judgment and apparent drug or alcohol abuse in the days leading up to the incident.

The contractors have both been arrested and are claiming that they were acting under orders from both the ACCO officials and an officer of the Iraqi Federal Police to disregard their lack of law-enforcement credentials and act immediately to save the lives of themselves and others. Furthermore, they claim that they received fire from the building and that they shot only at armed militants, who were in the process of murdering hostages and had previously made a credible threat to detonate a chemical warhead.

Apparently, all the IFP officers who went with the delegation are either under arrest or at least confined to barracks. An investigation of the affair is ongoing in Baghdad, but so far, neither the MoI nor the Commission of Integrity has made any attempt to send another delegation down to Dhi Qar.

Any comments? Questions? Stuff that would help me think about this better because I have to finalise it now? :)

*Oddly, with the notable exception that infant mortality has remained relatively stable and mother and child survival rates have even improved slightly overall.
**Which would be the expected pattern for corruption, which, let us be realistic, is going to be found on a large scale nearly anywhere a government was made under wartime conditions, nearly from scratch, in an area without a long tradition of democratic, constitutional principles and accountable public service.
***Kurdish Sunnite from Erbil.