Suspected child traffickers arrested in Nineveh, Maysan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Child traffickers suspected of selling newborn babies have been arrested in two separate operations in the north and the south of the country, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced on Friday.

“The intelligence agency… arrested a gang of suspects who were seeking to sell a newborn baby in Nineveh Governorate for a sum of money,” read the Interior Ministry statement.

A second group of three suspects who were seeking to sell a newborn baby were arrested in Maysan, the statement added.

Some of the suspects admitted to their intention of selling the newborn babies, according to the ministry.

Human trafficking is a country-wide problem in Iraq.

The US State Department's Trafficking in Person report downgraded Iraq from Tier 2 in 2022 to Tier 2 Watch List in 2023, saying that despite "significant efforts" to comply with Trafficking Victims Protection Act standards, Baghdad had failed to do so.

Countries listed on the report's Tier 2 Watch List have a significantly increasing number of victims of severe forms of trafficking and the government is not taking proportional efforts to address them or have failed to provide evidence of their increasing efforts to combat the crime.