Seven Baghdad education staff arrested over jobs-for-cash fraud network

BAGHDAD — Seven employees of Baghdad’s Rusafa First Education Directorate have been arrested over a fraud network that allegedly took money from people in exchange for promises of government jobs, the Federal Commission of Integrity said Friday.

The commission said it had uncovered “a network of 12 employees who defrauded citizens by promising them appointments in exchange for financial payments,” operating since November 2025. The suspects are also accused of forging appointment documents and arranging salaries for employees who never reported to work.

Two teams from the commission’s Baghdad Investigation Directorate, each assigned to a different neighborhood, carried out the arrests with law enforcement agencies, and warrants were issued for the other five. A judge at the Rusafa investigation court for integrity, money laundering and economic crime cases ordered the seven detained after reviewing the seizure report. The commission did not say how many people had paid or how much.

In late July, the commission said it had broken up an alleged forgery network in Diwaniyah, arresting 13 people, including government employees and lawyers, accused of producing false documents to obtain public loans, residential land and other state benefits worth more than 4 billion dinars (about $2.6 million at the official rate).

Iraq scored 28 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, published in February, ranking 136th of 182 countries and territories, up from 26 and 140th the year before. Corruption was among the main grievances behind the nationwide Tishreen protests in 2019, and cases have spanned customs, taxation, procurement, state-owned companies, public contracts, oil and infrastructure.