Baghdad The political and economic expert, Jalil Al-Lami, stressed that the lack of financial allocations and foreign agendas is a major reason for the disruption of the country’s factories and laboratories.

He told the National Iraqi News Agency that for many years, the industrial sector, like other economic sectors, has witnessed a great delay in its work, and thousands of state-owned projects and factories have stopped due to sabotage, theft and neglect that occurred after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Al-Lami added: The crisis does not stop here. It is above disrupting this productive sector. Millions of dollars are paid from the state budget to the workers of hundreds of stalled factories, after the industrial sector in Iraq represented (23%) of the total output before 2003.

He explained: There were pharmaceutical , weaving and apparel laboratories, fertilizers, phosphates, and sugar factories, cement and steel mills and micro industries and other foodstuffs and dairy, which are achieved self-sufficiency. Today, however, they become a burden on the state, which pays the salaries of thousands of its employees and workers without doing any work.

He attributed the reasons for the chronic inability to revive the factories primarily due to the lack of financial allocations. As well as a foreign political agenda behind this to ensure that Iraq continues to import its needs and to make Iraq a consumer environment and not an exporter that depends for everything on the rest of the countries, in addition to creating unemployment and pushing youth energies to violence and extremism.

Source: National Iraqi News Agency