Kimber Heinz and Ali Issa, 2012
Preface
In late 2012, we set out to write this essay as both an intervention into the literal business of war and a means to amplify liberatory work on the ground in US-occupied places. We wanted to demonstrate the ties between capitalism and empire, and to hold the U.S. accountable for both its military and economic approaches to war and occupation. We were working as organizers with a 100-year old organization, the War Resisters League, reflecting on the decade plus of the Global War on Terror and its impacts on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as others surveilled, policed, held captive, and killed within and outside of U.S. borders. We also understood the profound need to uplift the personal, political, and economic agency of people living in places occupied militarily.
Through our present work as a public historian focused on twentieth-century U.S. radical internationalist histories (Kimber) and as the general coordinator of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City (Ali), we continue to find resonances between what we wrote in this essay and our current moment in the Fall of 2023.
Since we submitted this piece, contexts have changed dramatically both in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the sectarianism and class division promoted by the U.S. and regional powers have remained powerful forces, preventing the kind of self-determined future that the labor organizing sketched below continues to fight for. The key recent moment of resistance to those forces of domination was the historic and massive protest movement sparked in October 2019 (featured in the brilliant documentary film Baghdad on Fire) against the entire Iraqi political class, as well as all forms of foreign and especially regional influence. This movement was led by poor and working-class—often feminist—Iraqis, demanding, “We want a homeland” (نريد وطن ).” In Afghanistan, the U.S. withdrew its military forces in 2021 and the Taliban seized state power. Despite these complex dynamics impacting projects like Kandahar Treasure (described below), there have emerged since the troop withdrawal Afghan women-led grassroots efforts to resist the Taliban’s patriarchal rules, organized without the aid of outside forces.
In the coming months, we plan to write an updated introduction to this essay, in hopes that we can provide more context, analysis, and resources about some of the major shifts over the past decade in global empire and militarism involving the US’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also hope to lift up more recent organizing and cultural production against empire, capitalist extraction, and authoritarianism in these two formerly US-occupied countries. Please stay tuned.
– Kimber & Ali, September 2023
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When people in the U.S.—or indeed most parts of the world—think of Afghanistan and Iraq, they often think of tragedy: the last decade has brought the longest U.S. war in history and another that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But as these wars are “over” or “wrapping up,” we’re left to further examine what remains in these places, and, better yet, what foments, rises up, and grows anew. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, their economies have been seized by U.S. and international capitalist forces, in Afghanistan by way of “foreign aid” that is part of the U.S. “counterinsurgency strategy” there, and in Iraq by way of privatization. In both cases, capitalist models for economic development, the management of natural resources, and direct support for people living in war zones present the softer side of U.S. militarism, sometimes also attempting to legitimize U.S. military intervention itself. In Afghanistan, U.S. and international aid continues to be the way that the U.S. military hopes to win the “hearts and minds” of Afghan women who struggle to create their own visions for an economically sustainable future. In Iraq, a war fought for resource control and geostrategic advantage offered privatization as the best way to recover, but triggered instead a successful grassroots anti-privatization campaign. In this essay, we hope to demonstrate the ways that militarism and capitalism have mutually supported one another in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and also highlight two initiatives, one in each country, that challenge both militarism and capitalism at their intersection through practices of economic cooperation. We hope that these explorations will help people resisting capitalism link war and empire and also internationalize alternative models to capitalism.
Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, there are a number of reasons that the U.S. went to war, one of the principal reasons being the beginning of the Global War on Terror and the use of the tragic events of 9/11 as a pretext to send U.S. troops, weapons, and military aid all over the world. Afghanistan was the first stop of the war on terror and the Karzai government now in charge in Kabul was put in power by the U.S. after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban in 2001. In addition to the U.S. objective to maintain its global military hegemony, particularly in Central Asia with its proximity to the oil-rich countries of Western Asia, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has made particular corporations and financial institutions rich(er) through private contracts with the U.S. government related to the occupation of Afghan land and the takeover of the Afghan economy.
U.S. and international aid is a key part of this capitalist money-making strategy in Afghanistan. Although international aid is supposed to directly benefit the people living in war zones and somehow separate them from “the enemy,” aid funds from the U.S. government overseen by the State Department and USAID often go directly into the hands of U.S.-based and/or multinational private contractors. In a June 2011 report issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the committee found that, in Afghanistan, “More can still be done to reduce our reliance on contractors…more U.S. funding could be channeled to national Afghan civil society organizations instead of large, international contractors.” The report goes on to describe one story that is fairly emblematic of the way that U.S. aid rarely gets into the hands of the people living in U.S.-occupied places: “A New Jersey-based engineering consulting firm that accounted for over a third of USAID’s total contract obligations in Afghanistan between FY2007 and FY2009 (the Louis Berger Group, Inc.) recently admitted to submitting “‘false, fictitious, and fraudulent overhead rates for indirect costs…[resulting] in over-payments by the [U.S.] government in excess of $10 million…’” (1)
For the people of Afghanistan, there remains the underlying questions of who benefits from aid money and whether it will ever help them in their daily lives. According to Rangina Hamidi, an Afghan-American peace activist and small business owner who has spent her life split between living in the U.S. and Kandahar province in Afghanistan, “…even though many Afghans know that a lot of aid has come since the past eight years, because of the level of corruption, the people, in the very end, the people in the villages, the people in the small cities, have hardly seen any kind of difference in their lives from when the Taliban were in power to now.” (2)
One key reason that the majority of the people of Afghanistan have seen so little of this aid money is because, under the U.S.-NATO “counterinsurgency” strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan, aid money and “international support” for the Afghan economy is directly tied to the occupation and to a particular military strategy. The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan calls on the military to secure key areas—“clear” and “hold”—while USAID and its counterparts follow up with the “build” and “transfer” phases. U.S. and international aid to Afghanistan is inextricably bound up with militarism and the pursuit of empire. As a result, Afghans such as Rangina Hamidi have taken it upon themselves to find their own answers to living under and resisting occupation and to seek alternatives to the international aid that both provides for the private takeover of Afghanistan’s economy and legitimizes occupation.
When Hamidi first returned to Afghanistan in 2003 following her years in Pakistan and in the U.S. after her family’s escape from Afghanistan in 1981 (following the Soviet military invasion and the beginning of the U.S. proxy war with the Soviet Union), she started working in the international nonprofit sector and learned much about the role of aid in supporting occupation. Hamidi worked with Afghans for Civil Society (ACS), a nonprofit group in Afghanistan founded by a U.S. businessman from Baltimore, Maryland. It is part of ACS’s mission to “address critical needs” in Afghanistan “while simultaneously instilling community ownership of the reconstruction process [and] providing means for implementing a democratic society.” One substantial effort hosted by ACS was a conference in Kandahar on women’s rights. The conference concluded with the founding of an “Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights,” which was lauded soon after by a New York Times editorial as “an extraordinary document” promoting the development of Afghanistan. (3) The event was co-sponsored by the Kabul and New York City-based organization, Women for Afghan Women, a group that publicly supports the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S.-NATO occupation. (4)
Even when operating with the best of intentions, the international and nonprofit aid community in Afghanistan is deeply flawed in its efforts to promote true democracy and self-determination for Afghans. On the one hand, acting as the sometimes only source of financial support for people who have had their lives and livelihoods severely altered or destroyed by war and militarism while, on the other, serving as a conduit for the justification of continued occupation, occupied peoples sometimes feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Many aid organizations only fund projects that are in line with Western visions of democracy. Projects such as an “Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights” may be a source of real inspiration to the group of women who worked together on it, but may also be used by organizations and the U.S. government and mainstream media to convince people living here that U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan is good for Afghans. One of the central myths perpetuated by the U.S. government immediately following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was that the U.S. had to be there to defend Afghan women from the Taliban. As most antimilitarist activists and journalists who have been following the effects of the war on Afghans could tell you, no average person in Afghanistan has it any easier as a result of the drone strikes, night raids, and disappearances that are part and parcel of the occupation, nor have Afghan women come to have many more freedoms under an Afghan government of U.S.-backed warlords who view women’s role in society in much the same way as the Taliban—but these stories rarely make their way into the pages of the New York Times.
Because many Afghans recognize that reliance on aid is also an implicit reliance on militarism to meet people’s basic needs and to establish systems of governance, they look for an alternative social and economic system where they can draw on their own history, culture, and experiences to create something that will help them meet their needs and challenge their oppressors, both foreign and internal. For Rangina Hamidi, the answer was small business—a business founded not through international micro-credit or a continued reliance on aid, but one that has used aid as the start-up capital needed to become a self-sustaining project that supports the families of the more than 450 Afghan women whom her project employs. The business that Hamidi started is Kandahar Treasure, an embroidery project that employs women living in Kandahar province, one of the central fronts of the U.S. occupation: “If Kandahar falls, so goes Afghanistan. Everyone understands that it’s a jewel that needs to be protected,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Reik Andersen, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 12th Infantry Regiment, following the 2009 U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan. (5)
The women employees of Kandahar Treasure work at home to make pieces of traditional southern Afghan embroidery, called Khamak (pronounced kha-mahk) that are placed for sale on the international market, centrally in the U.S., Canada, and Afghanistan. The women are paid directly for each embroidered piece that they finish and there are no strings attached to payment. Kandahar Treasure was started with a $55,000 seed grant from USAID to ACS, one of the limited times that Kandahar Treasure has been supported by funds from the international aid community. It has been Hamidi’s goal upon founding the project to be totally self-sufficient, and she does not accept any form of microcredit or foreign assistance: “I am against a ‘beggar economy,’” says Hamidi. “We should not be given more money, but create an economy that will be sustainable.” (6)
In addition to providing a means of economic stability for Afghan women and families who rarely see the aid money that comes through governments and international nonprofits, Hamidi believes that Kandahar Treasure gives women power within their families and within traditional Afghan culture:
“When a woman earns, it gives her power beyond our understanding and imagination. Women are always a liability here…every aspect of their lives has to be taken care of by a man figure in the household. And, so now, with women having the ability to earn money, at home even, they now have the opportunity to become an asset to the family. Indirectly, we’re also changing the social dynamics of the society, and that is an important step to changing women’s rights and women’s social reality in the country that we’re working in.” (7)
Kandahar Treasure seeks to liberate Afghan women in the context of the culture in which they live. “Kandahar Treasure respects the fact that women in Kandahar live in a very strict cultural, traditional conservative society,” says Hamidi. “Almost all the women we work with in our business don’t have the permission to leave their home to work. So, realizing this fact, we decided that we would go to their homes rather than ask them to come to a production site.” (8) It may be difficult for many people living in the U.S. to imagine what it is like to live in a society or culture that so strictly limits the basic freedoms of women. But while it is crucial for people living in the U.S. to support Afghan women’s efforts to liberate themselves, we must recognize that is not our place to dictate the terms of their liberation. Kandahar Treasure provides an opportunity for women in Kandahar to make a living without leaving their home or violating other laws that may directly endanger them while centering Afghan women as the key players in economic, social, and cultural change. Employees of Kandahar Treasure are able to financially provide for their families in ways that they hadn’t previously been able to do under laws imposed by both the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Karzai regime. This has enabled them to leverage decision-making power at home and at the local level.
Situated in a war zone, Kandahar Treasure, through a small business model of grassroots economics, provides one model for a democratically-minded sustainable economy created by and for Afghans—Afghan women in particular. This provides an alternative to Western-influenced economic development models that prop up modern-day warfare and imperialism. Although small business is ostensibly a part of capitalist systems, initiatives such as Kandahar Treasure which prioritize workers and their communities in the spirit of worker cooperation for the benefit of everyone in a society contest a cornerstone of capitalism—that which favors an owning class over those who do a majority of the work.
Furthermore, because capitalism is so intertwined with militarism in Afghanistan, small business projects like Kandahar Treasure also challenge the fabric of U.S. militarism and the tenuous ground that occupation stands on. These business projects put Afghans at the center of the Afghan economy and take power out of the hands of those who are given control during an occupation—corrupt politicians, military contractors, and international nonprofits and aid organizations. Giving Afghans control over their own economy also limits the ways in which international corporations and financial institutions can profit off of war-making and disrupts the narrative that Afghans need external guidance in order to provide for their own communities. In addition, the fact that Kandahar Treasure raises the economic standing of women in Kandahar and helps Afghan women leverage more power in their families and communities disrupts the key U.S. war narrative that the U.S. must occupy a given country in order to “liberate” the women living there. (9)
This doesn’t mean that Afghans don’t need international solidarity to achieve their liberation and self-determination. After 10 years of the U.S.-NATO war, the economy of Afghanistan has been plunged into quagmire and the people of Afghanistan need reparations for what has been taken from them, with financial compensation from formerly occupying nations as a crucial second step, the first being a responsible end to the occupation. But outside support does not mean external control, and the people of the U.S. can and should act in solidarity with Afghans to call for an immediate end to the U.S.-NATO occupation and the permanent removal of all U.S. and multinational corporations and military contractors from Afghanistan.
Iraq
The documentation proving that the prize of Iraqi oil was a central motivation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and the crushing sanctions that preceded it—is in most circles no longer necessary to catalog. It is perhaps best summed up by the 2007 quote from former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” (10), and the leaked documents from October 2002 between British officials and British Petroleum (BP), which read: “We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in post-Saddam Iraq.” (11)
What the U.S., its allies and multinational corporations stood to gain from greater access to Iraq’s oil and natural gas wealth (which some predict to be greater than Saudi Arabia’s) was not so much that they would own that wealth (although with some of the contracts negotiated by oil giants such as ExxonMobil, the amount of profit rivals that of standard private ownership), but that they would have the ability to channel it, when needed, and so increase the amount of oil produced globally, allowing for a huge amount of control of the economy worldwide. This then brings us from the realm of pure resource extraction to the subtler one of political hegemony. Iraq’s constitution, written by those with direct ties to those companies that would benefit from a new global carbon arrangement, is important to understanding how political control over Iraq was to be achieved, and what the resistance to it has looked like. Iraq’s 2003 constitution divided Iraqis based on Islamic sect and ethnicity and enshrined that division into Iraq’s central institutions, virtually ensuring a narrow, competitive political landscape that would by definition be unresponsive to broad demands by mass movements across Iraqi society.
Following the U.S. invasion, the privatization of Iraq’s oil industry (which had been nationalized since 1972) and its possible dramatic expansion to include untapped oil lying beneath Iraqi’s soil, promised massive increases in revenue for the Iraqi government and the oil corporations to which it envisioned granting lucrative deals. Whether this increased revenue would improve the lives of everyday Iraqis already reeling from past and present wars and the U.S.-imposed sanctions was not much of a concern for those making Iraq’s economic future. However this was certainly on the minds of those whose labor was essential to this new Iraq: its oil workers and union leaders, who understood that the revenue would most likely not be directed towards Iraq’s ailing infrastructure, nor would it even necessarily provide or secure much-needed jobs (Iraq’s unemployment has hovered, by the most conservative estimates, around 18% since 2005.). (12)
Public feeling that the fate of Iraq’s oil would also be closely related to Iraq’s political future was also on the minds of those same oil workers, whose struggles over the meaning of the land’s resources, and their ultimately shared nature, were not forgotten in the midst of Iraq’s profound traumas since the early 1980s. Enter the struggle over Iraq’s “Oil Law” (alternatively known as the “Hydrocarbon Law.”) In this story, there are many lessons for how capitalism functions globally, and the hints of what resisting it means in some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable—war and occupation.
Our story begins in 1987 when Saddam Hussein pushed through an order banning independent Iraqi labor unions in the public sector—undermining a tradition of organizing in Iraq that stretched back to the 1940s. Flashing forward to July 2003, Paul Bremer—then occupation overseer—maintained Saddam’s ban for the newly occupied Iraq. Later revealing further disdain for the unions, which had begun forming despite the ban, the Iraqi government in August 2005 passed “Decree 8750,” allowing the state to seize union funds at any time. Finally, in February 2007, a proposed Oil Law was submitted by Oil Minister Husayn al-Shahristani to the Iraqi Parliament. Leaked versions of the law provoked controversy among many Iraqi politicians, resulting in several changes in form, but the central dramatic shift remained: much of Iraq’s oil would be under new “production-sharing agreements” that would allow 15-30 years of unfettered operational control over Iraq’s oil facilities to the multinationals that won contract bidding. Crucially, these arrangements were justified as necessary to attract investment and get Iraq’s economy “back on its feet,” considering how dangerous Iraq had become since the occupation (which it indeed had). The beneficiaries of this proposed global economic system—the oil giants and their associated governments—were the very same that had envisioned Iraq’s invasion and created the conditions for unprecedented levels of violence.
The organized campaign against the Oil Law actually began earlier, in December of 2006, when several important federations of unions met in Jordan. Among them was the 26,000 member strong Federation of Iraqi Oil Unions, closely tied to the nationally-owned Southern Oil Company in Basra, which had many strong allies across Iraqi labor sectors. Unions from across ideological divides agreed on tactical alliances, which meant that formations calling for worker self-management, like the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, focused on the immediate goal of stopping the Oil Law, seeing this as the moment to speak to a key national issue. The strategy of the campaign was simple: unlock the cross-class, intergenerational, anti-sectarian potential of ordinary Iraqis’ desire for economic sovereignty and their disgust with an executive branch widely seen as deeply complicit in Iraq’s sectarian violence. Its tactics relied on public demonstrations, conferences, petitions, and, most crucially, what workers were best positioned to do: strikes and industrial sabotage. (13)
The campaign, while facing severe repression (with some of its leaders jailed or even killed by the Iraqi authorities), gained momentum throughout 2007. According to one of the leaders of the Federation of Oil Iraqi Unions, Jamal Jum’a, in May 2007:
“The oil law does not represent the aspirations of the Iraqi people [ . . . ] It will let the foreign oil companies into the oil sector and enact privatization under so-called production-sharing agreements. The federation calls on all unions in the world to support our demands and to put pressure on governments and the oil companies not to enter the Iraqi oil fields.” (14)
At the same time, the force of this movement, in addition to in-fighting over which Iraqi elites would benefit more, began to affect those in Iraq’s slightly more accountable Parliament. So much so that even The New York Times, which had parroted many of the arguments about the benefits of the law, was forced to admit (in sectarian language about “Sunni opposition”) that its chances of passing were dwindling:
“[Saleem Abdullah, Iraqi legislator] said Sunni Arabs were also worried that the law would give foreign companies too large a role in the country’s oil industry. Sunni Arab political leaders supported cabinet approval of the draft law, but appear ambivalent now.“ (15)
Tabled over and over and mired in committees, the Oil Law never gained enough backing in the Iraqi Parliament and faded as an issue, as talk about U.S. crimes against civilians and imposing a withdrawal timetable began to dominate, while the semi-autonomous Iraqi-Kurdistan government resorted to direct deals with multinationals that sidestepped sanctioned legalization.
This remarkable victory still persists into 2012 (though a weakened Oil Law was rammed through the Parliament in late 2011). What this means is that though contracts with oil giants were finally signed, they could still be declared illegal by the Iraqi Parliament, with the specter of future mobilizations for Iraqi economic sovereignty never too far away.
Conclusion
What the above case studies centered around Kandahar and Basra demonstrate, more than the interdependence of capitalism and militarism, is the potential for peoples under occupation—those facing the full thrust of empire’s arsenal—to imagine and act collectively and to begin to build their own economic destinies. To be sure, these are small victories and organizing efforts that are far from utopian, as both a small business that caters to an international clientele and labor unions that depend on global oil sales remain reliant on capitalism to survive. But worker solidarity and the creation of models that put people and economic sovereignty before profit and political gain strike at the heart of capitalism, which relies upon the division of workers—of people from one another—to exist.
Militarism similarly relies upon acts of division, dispersal, and extermination and separates people who might otherwise have an interest in a common well-being for all communities, such as in the case of giving aid centrally to those groups who support a continued U.S.-NATO occupation of Afghanistan or the U.S. government’s playing up and helping institutionalize ethnic and sectarian lines in Iraq. In that sense, solidarity economy efforts in places occupied by the U.S. also take aim at militarism when they bring people together across divisions—both real and constructed. (16) As the intersection of capitalism and militarism makes up the core of U.S. empire, we hope that groups and organizations resisting capitalism, including co-ops, collectives, and unions that exist globally, will take note of the relationship between imperialism and our globalized economy. U.S. anti-capitalists must prioritize building solidarity with communities resisting both U.S. militarism and its softer economic side to nurture cooperation at the frontlines of empire.
Kimber Heinz is the Curator of Political and Economic History at the North Carolina Museum of History and a PhD student in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A public historian, Kimber is also an independent exhibit developer with her business, Scaffold Exhibits and Consulting. She is a former national organizer with War Resisters League, an antimilitarist organization based in New York, NY. Kimber holds master’s degrees in History/Museum Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, both from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has a 3-year-old at home and lives in Mebane, NC. Kimber’s historical research focuses on intersectional antimilitarist movements in the late-twentieth-century US south.
Ali Issa is the General Coordinator of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC [https://gocoopnyc.org/.] He previously worked with War Resisters League, the Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project, and New Economy Project as lead organizer with the Public Bank NYC coalition. Originally from Iowa, Ali holds a Master’s degree in Arabic Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of the book Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq. His translations have appeared in Jadaliyya, Banipal and the PEN World Atlas. Ali is a committed fan of improvised music and lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Notes
Thank you much for your insights and feedback on this piece to: Anand Gopal, Seelai Karzai, and Zahra Ali.
1. United States Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations. Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan, 2011, Washington: Government Printing Office.
2. Democracy Now, “‘Sending More Troops Will Not Solve the Problem’—Grassroots Activist Rangina Hamidi,” 10 March 2009 http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/10/ sending_more_troops_will_not_solve.
3. Afghans for Civil Society, “About Us,” https://web.archive.org/web/20061006031445/http://www.afghansforcivilsociety.org/about.htm
(2005).
4. Michelle Goldberg, “A Feminist Case for War?” The American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/feminist-case-war-0 (October 27, 2009).
5. Yaroslav Trofmov, “U.S. Plans Defense of Kandahar” The Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703422904575038831080594928.html (February 1, 2010).
6. Aleksandra Stys “What a Difference an Afghan (business) woman Can Make: Kandahar Treasure.” The Cosmopolitan Review, (June 19, 2010).
7. Kandahar Treasure, “Business Empowering Women,” 2012 http://www.kandahartreasure.net/
businessempoweringwomen.html.
8. Kandahar Treasure, “Business Empowering Women,” 2012 http://www.kandahartreasure.net/
businessempoweringwomen.html.
9. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
10. Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, 2007.
11. “Blood for oil? Documents reveal talks between Government and oil giants BEFORE invasion of Iraq” April 20th, 2011.
12. Inter Agency Information and Analysis Unit, “Iraq’s Labour Force Analysis 2003-2008,” 2009. http://www.iauiraq.org/reports/Iraq_Labour_Force_Analysis.pdf
13. Issa, “The Unfinished Story of Iraq’s Oil Law: An Interview with Greg Muttitt”, July 24th, 2012. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/26710
14. Weinberg, “Iraq’s Civil Resistance.” December 6th, 2007.
15. “Iraqi Blocs Opposed to Draft Oil Bill” May 3rd, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/world/middleeast/03iraq.html
16. Solidarity Economy Principles Project, “What do we mean by solidarity economy?” (2020).