Iraq’s ‘Iron Woman,’ Once Honored by Biden’s State Department, Now Appears on U.S. Terror Watchlist

Four years ago, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood beside then-first lady Jill Biden and handed Taif Sami Mohammed Al Shakarchi one of the State Department’s most prestigious honors, crediting the Iraqi finance official with defying threats to root out graft inside her government. He called her Iraq’s “Iron Woman.”Today, Ms. Mohammed cannot set foot in America.The FBI has placed her on the federal terrorism watchlist, the State Department has revoked her visa, and Iraqi judicial authorities have separately summoned her as part of a corruption probe into government contracts. She is believed to be outside Iraq and has not been detained.The State Department confirmed the reversal late last month. Since then, officials in Baghdad and Washington have circled back to the same uncomfortable question: How does someone once held up as a face of anti-corruption courage end up on a watchlist reserved for suspected threats to national security?Some Iraq watchers already read the episode as less a story about one official than about how little scrutiny accompanies Washington’s biggest honors in the first place.“Awards like International Woman of Courage are often political branding exercises, not rigorous security reviews,” a political strategist and managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas, tells The New York Sun. “The fact that someone honored by Blinken and Jill Biden later landed on an FBI watchlist suggests the prior administration prioritized narrative over hard vetting.”From Women of Courage to a WatchlistMs. Mohammed’s fall did not happen overnight. She served as Iraq’s deputy finance minister beginning in 2019 and simultaneously as director general of the budget department, a post she held after nearly three and a half decades in the ministry, having started as a budget analyst in 1985, according to a State Department biography.Ms. Mohammed was named finance minister in 2022, the same year she received the International Women of Courage Award, an honor the State Department gives annually to women overseas deemed to have shown exceptional bravery.By last year, that image had begun to crack.Representatives Joe Wilson of South Carolina and Greg Steube of Florida, both Republicans ,accused Ms. Mohammed of serving as a “key enabler of terrorist funding in Iraq.” They have urged the Trump administration to impose sanctions on her.Lawmakers had raised broader concerns for more than a year about the movement of American dollars through Iraq’s financial system toward Tehran and Iran-aligned militias. However, the State Department has not said publicly whether those concerns triggered Ms. Mohammed’s placement on the watchlist.The assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, Dylan Johnson, announced the visa revocation in a statement last month, casting it as a direct rebuke of the prior administration’s judgment.“While the Biden State Department shamefully celebrated and awarded foreigners who threaten our nation, the Trump State Department revokes their visas and ensures these individuals are removed from our country,” Mr. Johnson said. “Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio, suspected terrorists will never be allowed to remain in the United States.”Neither the FBI nor the department has provided a timeline for when Ms. Mohammed’s name was added to the FBI’s list. A watchlist placement carries no legal presumption of guilt. It is not a criminal charge, and she has not been charged with terrorism in the United States.In any case, Iraq’s financial system has long been a weak point, according to one risk analyst who has tracked the region’s banking sector for years.“Dollar access, state banks, and opaque contracting have repeatedly been used to move money toward Iran and Iran-backed militias,” a global financial risk analyst, Dennis Santiago, tells the Sun. “The public record does not yet prove the watchlist allegation in court, but the pattern in Baghdad’s financial institutions is well established: control of the treasury is power, and that power has too often served Tehran’s network.”Mr. Santiago cautions that little evidence against Ms. Mohammed has been made public.“Taif Sami Mohammed had a documented track record as a reformist at the time that she received her award,” he explains. “Sami’s linkage to this degradation remains cloudy. I could find no public record copy of the FBI paperwork that the State Department says it relied on for its decision.”An Iraqi Corruption Case Unfolds in ParallelBut Washington’s watchlist action is not the only legal cloud hanging over Ms. Mohammed.Iraqi judicial authorities issued a formal summons for her and added her name to a list of wanted individuals as part of a widening investigation into corruption and the squandering of public funds tied to government contracts, according to Kurdistan24.That domestic probe, which has also implicated other former senior Iraqi officials, predates the American watchlist news by about three weeks, with the summons reportedly issued on August 9.The suspicions did not surface all at once. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Steube’s terrorist-financing accusations had already been circulating for more than a year by the time speculation grew intense enough that Ms. Mohammed’s office felt compelled to publicly deny any wrongdoing in June. It would be another two months before Iraqi authorities issued their formal summons, and roughly three weeks after that before Washington acted on the watchlist and visa. A judicial summons under Iraqi law does not by itself establish guilt, and Ms. Mohammed left her post as finance minister this summer after roughly four years running the ministry. Still, the timing of the parallel investigations has fueled speculation across Iraqi and American media about what, precisely, drew scrutiny toward an official that Washington itself had celebrated as a reformer just four years earlier. Ms. Mohammed has pushed back tenaciously against both threads of the story. The statement from her office in June said that reports circulating in the media and on social platforms were “completely false.”After the visa revocation, she issued another statement denying the accusations outright and rejecting her placement on the FBI list, calling the claims against her unfounded.“There is plenty of reporting on the fact that the Iraqi government is going after many banks that have succumbed to the loopholes that the Iranians have been trying to open as they punch through the wall of sanctions imposed by the West,” Mr. Santiago says.“While many banks have been named, none of the notations on these banks that I have looked into have a smoking gun naming her as being part of the investigation of that bank. I’m a bit of an innocent until proven guilty kind of person, so I’m looking for some better evidence on this before taking any sort of accusatory position.”A Reckoning for Washington’s VettingFor the recipient of an award designed to spotlight moral courage on the world stage, Ms. Mohammed’s case has become more of a cautionary tale about how little outside verification often accompanies such honors.The Women of Courage award is typically decided through nominations from American embassies abroad, meaning the same diplomatic apparatus now grappling with her alleged ties to terrorist financing was, in effect, part of the process that vouched for her four years earlier.Such a void has left room for competing narratives. Current American officials cast her rise and fall as proof of the previous administration’s carelessness, while Ms. Mohammed’s camp casts the entire episode as a campaign of unverified allegations against a career civil servant.Mr. Thomas puts the moment in even more jarring terms.“When the same official celebrated in Washington is later pursued at home over contracts and public money, it suggests the ‘Iron Woman’ branding was always overstated,” he says. “The prior approach treated Baghdad’s financial elite as partners to be flattered. The current approach treats them as a risk to be screened. That is overdue. If Iraq wants continued U.S. dollar access and financial cooperation, Washington should demand real transparency, not photo-ops with officials who later appear on terror watchlists.”Ms. Mohammed has not been convicted of any crime in either country, and neither case against her has been resolved. Still, once photographed shaking hands with Mr. Blinken and Mrs. Biden, Ms. Mohammed cannot enter the country that celebrated her, and for now, both cases are still open.

Iraq’s ‘Iron Woman,’ Once Honored by Biden’s State Department, Now Appears on U.S. Terror Watchlist

Iraq’s ‘Iron Woman,’ Once Honored by Biden’s State Department, Now Appears on U.S. Terror Watchlist

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